GETTING GROUNDED IN
CLOUD E-DISCOVERY
points and saying, "We trust your judgment and
would like your honest feedback," is crucial to
gaining broader acceptance.
Caroline: I agree with Mark. I think you also need to
understand your firm's culture and where the cloud
computing concept fits in your IT business plan.
I feel lucky because, in some respects, we've
already crossed some of those hurdles. We've used
a cloud-based document management system for
a long time. In some ways, this makes it easier
for attorneys to accept the concept of moving
e-discovery to the cloud. While we do a lot of
review in our internal platform, some attorneys
already use an outside provider's platform in the
cloud, so conducting e-discovery in the cloud is not
foreign to the legal team.
In addition, our current platform is centralized,
and all our users access it via the Web, so for many
users it is already "cloud-based." The issue for
many of our users then becomes what we were
talking about earlier — making sure processes
aren't disrupted.
We've also been working on a proof-of-concept
involving stakeholders within my team to get
them comfortable with how their processes will
change. This includes processing data, setting up
Having your data in the cloud is every bit as safe and worthwhile as
hosting the data on servers within your firm's walls.
and managing users, doing productions, managing
the database, etc. All this has been important in
alleviating the fear, "If we outsource this, what's
going to happen to our jobs?"
My team is very excited about the move, and
we're pulling in some attorneys who are advocates
of how best to use the technology to conduct
document review or data mining in a document
collection. Back to what Mark said about involving
those stakeholders in the process, it really shouldn't
matter to them where the data are hosted, just that
they're getting the service and the access to the
data needed to do their jobs.
