Implementing E-Discovery Technology the Easy Way

Organizations of a certain size—maybe it’s over $100 million a year, or $500 million, or even $1 billion—eventually need e-discovery software. They find themselves facing litigation more often, whether they’re employment matters, intellectual property matters, contract disputes, or something else entirely. They look at their problem and purchase a legal hold solution.

They implement the solution, manage legal holds, but continue to outsource the other stages of the EDRM to legal services providers (LSPs) or law firms. But eventually they grow more and face an increased workload. They decide there’s an opportunity for additional savings, or need to manage more legal matters, or for whatever reason decide to add to their legal technology stack. And therein lies the big challenge facing organizations that bring e-discovery operations in-house: the proliferation of technologies and the difficulties of using multiple software solutions.

E-Discovery Software Challenges

In partnership with the Association of Corporate Counsel, Exterro recently conducted a survey of 250 in-house counsel and legal operations professionals. When asked about the challenges they faced, the responses had a consistent theme: multiple, disparate technology solutions make accomplishing one’s job confusing, tedious, and difficult.

Digging deeper into the data in the survey, the question asked respondents to identify their biggest challenges when using legal technology. Respondents could select more than one response. The top five results are revealing:

Multiple, disconnected software solutions pose challenges to legal users. The lack of connections requires users to learn multiple interfaces as well as transfer data and work products from one piece of software to another.

Poor user experiences undermine software usefulness. Some software is built primarily with IT users in mind. They offer powerful technologies but require advanced data or programming skills to use them effectively. Other programs may require users to conduct processes manually, such as ingesting data for document review.

A unified platform solves these problems. These four challenges are really symptoms of an underlying cause—the lack of an effective platform solution that manages e-discovery from start to finish. An orchestrated e-discovery solution solves these technology adoption challenges while simultaneously giving in-house teams the ability to perform traditionally outsourced tasks, like document review, in a secure, unified environment.

Streamlined Implementation of E-Discovery Software

Exterro’s follow-up exploration of the issues specific to in-house e-discovery teams, the 2021 E-Discovery Technology Report for In-House Professionals hints at a path forward for organizations looking to sidestep these technical issues: improve the buying process. Enterprises should learn some lessons from their smaller peers. 

Reduce the number of individuals involved in procurement. Legal and IT seem essential, and perhaps procurement or compliance, but make sure to keep the team at five or fewer. Larger teams have to deal with conflicting priorities, get bogged down rehashing discussions, and struggle to achieve consensus.

Set a time limit to make decisions. Many organizations, especially larger ones, get bogged down in buying cycles over six months long. Forty percent of organizations who knew how long their buying process took said it took over six months. Cutting this timeline down—or eliminating multiple buy cycles—can facilitate adoption and allow organizations to get more value out of e-discovery software faster.

Download the 2021 E-Discovery Technology Report for In-House Professionals today for more insights like these!