e-discovery 2.0

(Editor’s note: This special guest post was written by Chitrang Shah, Clearwell Principal Product Manager. He is an RIT alum and avid hiker who works with our engineering team and lead customers to optimize the product for large-scale review. – Kurt)

As we’ve previously shared, our product strategy throughout 2009 and 2010 was to expand the product footprint across the EDRM as customers were demanding a single, end-to-end eDiscovery product. During this period we successfully expanded from our roots in processing, search and analysis to review and production (August 2009), identification and collection (September 2010) and legal hold workflow (March 2011). Over the last several months, our focus has been to go deep in each of these modules and provide features that deliver even greater return on investment to our customers.

Today, I am excited to announce significant new features and feature enhancements to the Clearwell Review and Production Module and say a few words about what motivated us to build these features and how they enable our customers to further streamline their legal review workflow.

There are several exciting features in this release, but I would to like to highlight three in particular:

1. Ability to seamlessly import production load files

Most matters require reviewing relevant documents alongside the documents received from third parties, opposing parties, and even previous litigations. With the new load file import feature, users can now streamline the process of importing load files with three simple steps.

In Step 1, a step-by-step wizard-like interface guides users though the selection of formatting information such as field delimiters and nested value delimiters, metadata information such as bates numbers, family relationships, tags, folders and any number of custom attributes, and content information such as images, extracted text and native files. When the load file has both extracted texts and native files, the wizard gives users an option to specify which content should be used for searching.

In Step 2, the system performs a deep validation of the load file and generates a report documenting any inconsistencies such as missing bates numbers or missing values for required fields found in the load file. As a result, customers have the ability to quickly find and fix any issues with the load file before the import begins.

In Step 3, the system imports the documents and builds analytics. Once this step completes, the imported documents, including all metadata and content, are available for viewing and searching.

All the analytics capabilities customers are familiar with, such as discussion threads and concept search, are also available for documents imported from load files. This allows users to quickly discover documents in the load file that are conceptually similar to natively processed documents, for example.

2. Support for large scale reviews and productions

As the volume of electronically stored information (ESI) continues to grow, our customers find themselves reviewing and exporting more and more documents, and they need a solution that can cope with the massive growth in data. At the same time, they don’t want to spend large sums of money building a server farm in anticipation of the growth. They want the flexibility to add capacity when needed and remove it when not needed.

Clearwell’s scale-out architecture enables administrators to easily add appliances and allocate them to a particular matter and to a specific task using a point-and-click interface.

For example, if an administrator needs to increase the number of reviewers from 200 to 400 in order to meet a tight deadline, he or she can easily add 2 appliances to the cluster and assign them for review. Once the review completes, the administrator can now easily re-assign these appliances for production, allowing users to easily meet deadlines while reducing their overall hardware costs.

This flexibility allows our customers to maximize the use of their hardware resources while providing infinite review, export and production scalability.

3. Streamlined management of exports and productions

Clearwell provides powerful export options, and while our customers use them extensively for creating a variety of different production formats, they typically standardize on a few. Clearwell’s new case export and production templates provide a quick and easy way for case administrators to define the export format once and use it across multiple cases. When exporting documents, users can simply select a template from the list of visible templates in that case. This capability significantly reduces the overhead associated with managing export formats and allows our customers to produce documents in a consistent format across multiple matters.

Additionally, new production pre-mediation reports automatically identify problem documents and group them by issue type for quick resolution. This enables users to preemptively identify and resolve document production issues without delaying entire productions.

Says Wendy Butler Curtis, chair of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s eDiscovery Working Group, “Legal review is one of the most challenging phases of the eDiscovery process. As electronic data volumes continue to grow, it is increasingly important to leverage technologies that can streamline and improve legal review, ensure defensibility and reduce costs. Solutions like the Clearwell eDiscovery Platform enable legal teams to create an iterative eDiscovery workflow that allows for more efficient and effective large-scale review.”

We will be showcasing the new features at ILTA (Booth 816) this week in Nashville, so come see us and let us know what you think.

(Chitrang Shah is a Principal Product Manager at Clearwell Systems, now a part of Symantec, and the lead Product Manager for Clearwell’s Processing & Analysis and Review & Production Modules)

Last month at the Annual Conference of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), we saw an interesting trend – more and more law firms are asking how they can use e-discovery technology to provide greater value for clients. ILTA’s Law2020 initiative identifies the factors driving the shift in law firm priorities from reactive e-discovery at any cost to proactive measures designed to maximize value for clients. Ultimately, the client is going to have to drive innovation, and the client has certainly spoken in 2010.

I wanted to share my thoughts on how I believe the law firm of the future can benefit from promoting electronic discovery expertise to its clients as well as how becoming the trusted advisor in this area can lead to greater sustainability for the firm and lower client attrition rates.  I found the most recent issue of ILTA’s Peer to Peer magazine (“Law2020”, Issue 2 Volume 26, June 2010) fascinating, and the articles echoed much of what I am seeing in the legal marketplace today.  A handful of forward-thinking firms are embracing alternative fee agreements (AFAs) and promoting technology and efficiency to their clients in an attempt to both reduce the cost of the legal services being provided but also improve the overall experience for the client.  In an ancient profession, we are seeing the first widespread demand from clients for better customer service and accountability.  Clients are shopping multiple firms, and the hooks that firms had in many of their clients are disappearing as more and more corporations bring legal services, such as e-discovery, in house.  As one might say, the legal marketplace has become a “buyers’ market.”  As Richard Susskind predicts, we may see the legal services provided by law firms become more of a commodity in the coming decade.

Traditionally, law firms have not provided services beyond traditional representation, and although many law firms now have in house litigation support or legal technology departments, the services they provide from these departments are limited.  These departments often become a cost center rather than a profit center, and clients are demanding greater efficiency – to the point where law firms are seeking outside help from vendors to manage large electronic discovery projects.  This may not change much in the coming years, but there is a wonderful opportunity for law firms to enhance the services they are providing through these departments and become trusted advisors to their clients in the areas of electronic discovery, legal technology, and information management.  Given this opportunity, why are firms allowing outside consultants to collect all of the fees associated with advising their clients in this area?  Perhaps it is due to a lack of true project management expertise within the firm that prevents the firm from providing these services, or perhaps the firm believes that clients will not pay for proactive legal services.  Whatever the reason, firms are allowing a potential revenue opportunity and excellent client relationship opportunity to slip away.

Sustainability

In an interview in Peer to Peer, Darryl Cross said, “[Law Firms] must learn more about their clients and what they need in order to proactively serve them, because our studies show that once you cross the third or fourth practice group there’s almost no risk of the attrition of a client – it plummets to below 10 percent.”  In today’s legal marketplace, firms would do well to find ways to engage the client at multiple levels, and across multiple practice groups or partners.  One way they can do this is by becoming the trusted advisor for all things related to e-discovery – including early case assessments, culling and review techniques, proactive litigation readiness, , and assisting with vendor relations as clients bring more technology and processes in-house.  This will not only build trust with the client, but it will make processes more defensible and reduce the risk of error because everyone involved is familiar with the process.  Because e-discovery touches many practice areas, the opportunity to engage clients on these issues would be numerous.  Firms might even do well to appoint a partner who manages these proactive relationships with clients and seeks out opportunities to better serve the client through an extended offering of value-added services.  Centralizing this function would likely lead to better use of resources and uniformity across engagements, driving down costs.

Strategic Partnerships

Flash forward to 2020 for a moment, and imagine, if you will, a video conference (conference rooms are soooo last decade…) where a law firm’s client relationship partner is explaining to a client that by implementing various technology solutions, the client can achieve dramatically lower costs in litigation, and, after an explanation by the partner, a technology vendor presents a solution custom-tailored for the client. During the presentation, the partner and the client ask questions to ensure that the solution meets all of their needs and will be both defensible and efficient.  In 2020, perhaps all firms will be doing this; in 2010, though, today’s law firm can benefit tremendously by getting involved in this process and advising clients on the multitude of options with regard to technology.  For example, there are many deployment options available for most enterprise-class e-discovery solutions, and the firm can help the client decide which of these options would best suit their needs.  At the end of the day, the client will not seek out technology because they are fed up with paying too much to law firms; they will partner with a law firm to proactively reduce costs.  This type of arrangement and consulting service could even be the catalyst to begin talks about AFAs and really begin learning what the client really wants or needs.  Many times I have found that simply being heard goes a long way toward building long-lasting relationships.

Conclusion

As ILTA’s Law 2020 initiative kicked off at the annual conference last month, we should all be thinking of ways in which we can build more effective relationships with clients and how the law firm of the future will continue to achieve sustainability.  Those of us who are lawyers have an opportunity to become counselors again, and in today’s marketplace, streamlining costs is just as important as minimizing risk.  Those of us who are e-discovery or litigation support practitioners have a unique opportunity to maximize our value and increase our revenue generation through consulting services.  Achieving maximum sustainability and reducing or eliminating client attrition begins with finding ways to build lasting relationships with clients by addressing their broader needs – beyond the matter at hand.  By becoming the trusted advisor in areas that span multiple practice groups, the law firm of the future can stop looking like a commodity and begin to look again like an indispensable resource.

Learn More On Litigation Software & Litigation Support Software.

Learn More On Ediscovery Litigation.

This is the first of several guest posts from Kurt Leafstrand, formerly a rocket scientist at MIT and now an e-discovery guru at Clearwell. Kurt was on vacation last week, but couldn’t resist spending part of it at an important gathering in Florida. His report:

Last week, 3,000 of the country’s top legal technologists gathered in Orlando for the 2007 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference. Lawyers will always be lawyers, so the hotel staff seemed particularly diligent as they secured the electrical cords to the floor of the exhibit hall, and the Starbucks seemed a bit on the cool side. However, the discussions and technology were far from cold, and the show was a great chance to learn from some of the industry’s leading practitioners from both corporations and law firms.

E-discovery was the focus of many of the conversations, and several emerging trends were at the forefront:

Courts are taking a more active role in e-discovery: With the changes to rule 26(f) in the FRCP, parties are required to confer early (and agree on!) e-discovery. This has pushed the courts to start issuing guidelines to help remove some of the ambiguity from this process and to help parties reach a faster consensus. In one session, Browning Marean of DLA Piper highlighted as “best thinking” a protocol from the Maryland District Court, which included:

• Defining minimum standards for the kind of information to be exchanged
• Recommending that each party have an ESI coordinator (this may lead to IT/legal tech being brought into the meet and confer process)
• Setting defaults to be applied if parties can’t agree

One panelist pointed out that, in spite of all this, “the average litigator is woefully unprepared for the e-discovery aspects of the rule 26(f) conference.” With the courts showing early aggressiveness in ensuring that the FRCP changes are actually put into practice, it appears that the already intensive focus on ESI will only increase, so firms and corporations need to get their acts together quickly. Learn More On Frcp Electronic Discovery.

Discovery battles are taking center stage: In what many see as a worrisome trend, e-discovery battles are increasingly common and focus “not on the case and its merits, but on spoliation and sanctions.” Because of the error-prone nature of most e-discovery efforts, it often pays to look for “little slips… did some executive accidentally delete his email? Was there a failure to produce?” One astute participant commented that the “interest in sanctions is because electronic data is so treacherous. It’s much easier to get it wrong than right.”

Two current e-discovery “train wrecks” serve to highlight this:

• Intel/AMD: Despite elaborate and costly efforts to comply with preservation orders across 100,000 employees dispersed around the world, Intel found itself having to advise the court of “document retention lapses that have occurred…after the filing of complaint.“
• Qualcomm/Broadcom: The attorneys who represented Qualcomm in its unsuccessful patent lawsuit against Broadcom found themselves summoned before the court to show cause as to why sanctions shouldn’t be imposed for their failure to produce documents pertinent to the case: approximately 230,000 pages of documents, actually.

How do corporations and firms better manage their risk in light of these trends? One panel of senior partners suggested that parties need to work smarter, not harder, when it comes to e-discovery, and understand that the state of the art is moving toward a highly iterative e-discovery process. In most initial e-discovery requests today, “the signal-to-noise ratio is such that search results are often meaningless.”

This new approach will need to be “negotiated throughout the e-discovery process,” but is going to becoming increasingly critical for both sides of the case to work together on in order to assure that they don’t find themselves in the same (costly) boat as Intel and Qualcomm. This trend was especially relevant to ILTA attendees, because the only way to make this iterative process work is through their active participation, assisted by the next generation of e-discovery 2.0 technologies.