Electronic information has taken over our world, and continues to evolve day to day. A Comprehensive Discovery Management strategy is of paramount importance. A documented and defendable approach helps minimize risk, enabling organizations to respond quickly while predicting and controlling costs.
Even better, these benefits can be extended further by applying consistent processes and technologies across all cases, rather than a case-by-case basis. In the typical scenario, legal teams work with outside counsel to manage discovery independently as each case arises, rather than managing discovery holistically. This creates inefficiencies and reduces the amount of control your organization has over its information. Conversely, Comprehensive Discovery Management provides a phased, strategic approach to centralizing your information across all cases and aspects of litigation. This grants you total control over your information, which makes litigation costs dramatically lower and easier to predict.
Rather than taking a piecemeal approach that addresses your discovery management needs in a reactive manner, we provide a disciplined, systematic process for managing all aspects of discovery proactively. Our Comprehensive Discovery Management system is comprised of five phases: Planning, Collection, Processing, Review and Production.
Discovery Management: What’s in it for you?
Reduced Litigation Costs
Studies indicate that up to 90% of litigation costs are incurred during the discovery phase. A Comprehensive Discovery Management plan reduces the time and cost of discovery through efficiencies that include:
- Eliminating redundant and unnecessary work product performed by counsel
- Reducing the effort to learn new processes and technologies
- Reducing the time to identify and collect information for new matters
Dramatic Time Savings
Who is more often victorious in complex litigation: The party who delivers the most stirring closing argument? Or the party able to find key information within the volumes of irrelevant data to more quickly and effectively? We all know the answer.
The fact is, a Comprehensive Discovery Management plan reduces the amount of time spent identifying, collecting, reviewing and producing information by:
- Leveraging work product of other matters to begin initial disclosures and rolling productions sooner
- Maximizing resource allocation by allowing staff to shift between matters more quickly
- Reducing time and effort required to train on new processes and technologies
Quicker Response to Production Requests
In the deadline-intensive environment of litigation, quick and accurate responses are a huge advantage. Here’s how a Comprehensive Discovery Management strategy enables you to respond more rapidly to opposing counsel and the Court:
- You’re equipped with information collected from other matters that is ready for production with little or no further processing or review
- Time required to ramp up new collections, processing technologies, and review processes is greatly reduced
- You’re assured greater understanding of what relevant and responsive data may exist within the organization, where it resides, and how it can be produced before the matter arises
Greater Control Over Discovery
Many litigants feel they lose all control over the process once discovery begins—that their opponent serves broad requests for information and their only option is to undertake massive efforts and extraordinary costs to respond. Organizations prepared with a Comprehensive Discovery Management strategy control the discovery process. Here’s how:
- Understanding the relevant information within their organization, where it exists, and how it can be produced
- Ensuring that they are using the most cost-effective processes, resources, and technologies to accomplish their litigation goals
- Being better prepared to predict the level of effort and cost necessary to fully litigate the matter before discovery preparations begin in earnest
- Having more options available to conduct the litigation
Totally Secure Information
Organizations face enormous privacy and information security regulations, as well as increasingly complex protective orders—all of which affect confidential and sensitive business information. A Comprehensive Discovery Management strategy helps ensure your ability to protect the confidentiality of sensitive or legally protected data, as a result of:
- Consolidating information in a central environment—thereby eliminating the need for multiple physical or electronic collections with various counsel
- Creating real-time ability to grant or deny access to information to an individual or group as needed
- Creating the ability to track all parties who have accessed individual documents or electronic records
More Accurate Prediction of Litigation Costs
Accurate and timely predictions of litigation costs are a common challenge facing litigation managers today. Because discovery is the single largest driver of these costs, organizations that have developed a Comprehensive Discovery Management strategy can more accurately predict overall litigation costs by:
- Using standardized processes and technologies across cases, thereby applying best practices and lessons learned from each case to new matters
- Creating standard benchmarks for the time and effort required to perform common discovery-related tasks
- Creating budgeting and reporting standards for all matters. This ensures that unexpected changes in the litigation are understood as soon as possible, as is their impact on budget
