Digital White Papers

OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND! THE FUTURE OF LPS What will be the biggest driver of change in litigation and practice support (LPS)? How will law firm LPS departments change in the next five to 10 years? Florinda Baldridge: Recognizing the rise in e-discovery costs, cross-border litigation, data volumes and BYOD trends, law firms and e-discovery technology and service providers must continue to innovate and expand their levels of expertise to address these trends. While companies still look to outside counsel for the provisioning of e-discovery legal advice, increasingly e-discovery technology is either being acquired and brought in-house by corporate legal departments or outsourced to preferred service providers. Law firms and service providers must adjust their service models accordingly and work collaboratively to support clients' litigation management and costreduction strategies. Florinda: Legal project management (LPM) principles will play an increasingly larger role in how law firms manage their cases in order to meet client demands for transparency, collaboration, predictability, control and efficiency. While this won't be a big change for law firm practice support departments, as they have been applying project management principles and skill sets to e-discovery since the early 2000s, a law firm's investment in LPM initiatives could certainly elevate the role of project management in practice support. I also believe practice support service models will evolve into one of three models: •A hybrid approach in which the processing is outsourced and the hosting and technologyassisted review (TAR) are managed in-house Michelle: Based on the following assumptions: •Corporations will store all their data in the cloud; •There will be a lot of data; and •Employees will have integrated personal mobile devices (think Google Glass) with data being synchronized to the cloud, employees will collaborate actively inside and outside the corporation via interoperable technology, including social media. •Largely outsourced Michelle Mahoney: The biggest drivers for change will be clients' buying behaviors and their evolving views on their appetite for risk, technology and the level of investment in litigation as a form of business strategy. •Completely insourced, including processing and hosting; some groups even being spun off as subsidiaries of the law firm Florinda Baldridge is the Global Director of Practice Support at Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. She can be contacted at fbaldridge@fulbright.com. Those in LPS departments will have deep technical skills to navigate multiple cloud vendors' systems to extract, search and pattern-match (content and authors) to locate potentially relevant items. Data analytics, predictive coding and rules engines will apply to data sets routinely. There will be specialist cloud vendors that offer these services as part of hosting and will "package" the data for law firms.

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