Is the Single End-to-End E-Discovery Platform a Unicorn? Not According to this Legal Team!

In the e-discovery world, common knowledge says that a true end-to-end in-house process / single software solution doesn’t exist. But Linda Luperchio, Director of Information Lifecycle Governance and E-Discovery at Hanover, thinks otherwise. After she and her team evaluated more than 20 e-discovery products, some of whom actually told her, “You don't understand; that's not what you want,” she ultimately chose an Orchestrated E-Discovery Platform.

Orchestrated E-Discovery

For Linda and her team, Orchestrated E-Discovery starts with the legal hold tool, which immediately starts the hold as soon as there is a trigger. While that's happening, they have created an internal web form that tells IT exactly what legal needs. Linda can print that form, and it becomes her collection report.

Then she uses the data mapping tool, which helps her look at a certain business unit to find out what data and applications they are using, so that she can decide where to harvest data from. “If a company does anything,” Linda adds, “they should have a data mapping tool. It's the best tool to have.”

From there, the documents are dropped into the e-discovery data management Tool, which allows Linda to, as she puts it, “do anything.”

She explains: “I can OCR the document so they're readable or searchable. I can search by keyword. I can proximity search. I can go in and do an exception. I can go into any field that is on that document, and I can search by just that field. I can exclude by just that field. There are a lot of options.”

Then it’s on to the managed review tool, which Linda describes: “In there, I can Bates stamp, I can redact, I can do a CSV, I can do a DAT file. I can do anything I need to do to get it ready for production. Usually, once I get it to managed review, or sometimes even when it's in e-discovery data management, I'll have outside counsel come in at that time. I'll have labeled or tagged things with what they've said they were looking for, or I might note a few of them as ‘hot’ because I think I've found exactly what they're looking for. They go in. They drop files into a production set, which I’ve set up, then I go in and run the production, and we're done.”

Because of the problems that arise in the transitions between e-discovery stages and various stakeholders, Linda says she wouldn't consider a tool that didn’t put the entire process on a single platform. “With Orchestrated E-Discovery there’s a tool called 360 View, which allows me to look across the entire matter to see who's been in it, what's going on in it, if there are documents in privilege, and I have all of that in one tool.”

And not only is having an end-to-end tool important to Linda and her team, but having a tool that is user friendly is key. “I usually only spend about 20 to 30 minutes training. Then I have a two-page cheat-sheet to help them. Recently, I did a training for someone who knew other e-discovery solutions, but not ours, and it took us less than 10 minutes.”

Defensible and Cost Effective

Each department in a company has its own driving force: Business Units are concerned about return on investment and costs; IT is concerned about security; Legal is concerned about defensibility. Hanover shows that you can meet the needs of all parties involved through e-discovery. Linda Luperchio tells us how:

“Everyone's looking at cost. Everyone's looking at savings. We did a cost-benefit analysis, and I keep database that tracks it. At a minimum, we save at least 50% on average per case by having everything orchestrated in-house. If you have 100 cases, it comes out to a lot of money.

“But it's also very defensible. I can explain exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it an audit trail that runs through the whole thing. In one of our cases, we had a judicial discovery master come in to look at our process, and after two days he said, "You know what? I have no questions. This is a good system. We're good." So, I feel like it's been vetted. I feel like we've taken the time to do it right.”

Service Provider to other Internal Business Units

While building the process and working with Orchestrated E-Discovery, Linda began to explore ways the company could innovate and expand its use to other areas of the business involved requirements similar to those of typical e-discovery projects and could be equally streamlined with the same process improvements.

Internal investigations often involve email, and Linda estimates that a typical investigation will initially implicate about 100,000 emails on average. She described the company’s previous approach to internal investigations as highly manual and inefficient, so she sought a new approach that was less dependent on manual intervention from IT. She stated, “Rather than have our IT department go in and collect or do a proxy to a mailbox, it made more sense for everyone to be using a single software solution. That way we could create a matter and track it throughout its lifecycle.”

Over the years, this has developed even further, as Linda explains: “I see myself as a service provider. We have over 100 users right now, and everyone can go in and do all their own stuff. But I want to make sure that before that happens, I've set them up to succeed.”

At Hanover, the customizable nature of the tool allows Linda to use it beyond the standard e-discovery process to cover P&C business units, treasury department, employment, and internal audits, plus all the litigation -- claims, bonds, and regular litigation for the company. As Linda puts it, “Everything flows through our discovery solution.”

Working with Outside Counsel and 3rd Party Service Providers

Not only does Orchestrated E-Discovery allow Linda’s team to work with different units inside the company, but it works equally as well with third party service providers. Linda explains, “When I knew I was going to be looking for a service provider, I wanted to make sure that I didn't need the setup time. We have connectors that allow our outside counsel to come in through our firewall and use the platform.”

This keeps all operations in one place, so that Hanover doesn’t have to go to multiple technology solutions to find, collect, and track activities. “Orchestrated E-Discovery makes it easy to allow outside users into the system securely,” Linda says. “I create a matter team for every single matter (we have 117 right now), and they can only see the matter they are working on. I don't have to worry that someone's seeing something they shouldn't, because all they're going to see is the matter of I've assigned to them. When they're done, the minute they're done, I deactivate their user account, and I deactivate the matter. Then we leave it in holding for 90 days after resolution just in case there's an appeal. Then we get the sign-off from all the people involved when all is done, and all the data goes back to its original home and to its original retention: paper, hard copy, soft copy, doesn't matter. Then the matter is closed.”

Lessons Learned in the Quest for End-to-End E-Discovery

Linda and the team at Hanover has one of the most mature processes in e-discovery. Here are her 4 “Must Haves” based on her experience:

1. Do not skimp on training. Let your power users have as much training as they need, and make sure to continue that training over time so they’ve had a chance to see where the trouble spots are and ask questions.
2. Whatever you think you need for storage, double or triple it. If you can do unlimited, all the better. When I started, I figured it would only be litigation. Now we are serving every part of our company.
3. Data Mapping, knowing what and where your data sources are, is vital. Because how can you preserve and collect something if you don't even know what and where it is.
4. Make sure you have policies in place to support your programs. We have an information governance policy. We have a destruction policy. We have a mobile device, texting, and social blogging policy. We have all our policies to say why we do what we do, because when you get a big case, those questions are going to come up, and you don’t want to try to explain it without something already in place.