3 Ways an In-House E-Discovery Team Brings Value to Your Organization

What products and services does your firm find the most value in? For many, anything that can create cost savings or cost avoidance can have a high impact—and finding ways to reduce risk, improve efficiency, and build a wider library of knowledge to help inform your legal strategies are all part of that.

In-house e-discovery programs can add significant value above and beyond cost savings and avoidance to each subsection of the process, from information management to data processing. And best of all, building in-house teams that utilize end-to-end technology solutions effectively can put your organization on the path toward greater efficiency right away. Let’s take a look at three key ways these teams can help your organization.

Information Management and Identification Processes

Having end-to-end technology solutions will enable your organization to handle information governance and management all the way to production. A combination of tools that allow for legal holds and preservation, processing, and collection/early assessment of data is another way to get there—but you’ll want to ensure that your technology integrates with your other systems (like HR management, IT ticketing, and asset management systems). Strong technology integration means you’re avoiding costs by avoiding the need to hire outside vendors to make your technology work together—or having to buy new systems altogether. Litigation preparedness, legal hold, and data remediation processes are all made more efficient with in-house e-discovery teams, and they continue to create efficiency further along the process.

In-house e-discovery teams have a positive impact on your identification process and typically translate to fewer hours spent searching, tracking and following-up. This might also mean your organization avoids over or under-collecting data sources that are at scope for litigation, further saving time and money.

Data Collection and Preservation

For our purposes, let’s define risk reduction is the removal of human error from a given process. In-house e-discovery teams with end-to-end technology solutions allow for fewer IT resource hours spent applying preservation processes, and leave less room for manual error. The cost savings and cost avoidance potential here are huge—you’re saving money you’d normally be paying to a third-party vendor for that same data collection and preservation.

In-House Processing

“As many in the e-discovery space are fully aware, review is one of the more costly aspects of handling electronic discovery,” says Christa Haskins, Associate Director of e-discovery for Amneal Pharmaceuticals. “So whatever can be done in-house by the organization to lessen the amount of data that goes to review will result in cost savings.”

Having an in-house e-discovery team also means you’re processing your data in-house, which allows you to access the text and meta data of the documents you need much more quickly than through a third-party vendor. This means your in-house teams can start to assess the data earlier, allowing faster access to the data that is most relevant to you, and promoting less irrelevant data downstream for review.