Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/13683
When corporate legal departments bridge all their disparate in-house legal and corporate governance information, they obtain the power to control in-house legal operations and achieve a cohesive legal enterprise practice. This is legal enterprise management, which unifies previously siloed information from across the corporate legal department with the purpose of allowing the in-house legal department to leverage their corporate information to work smarter, more efficiently and more cost-effectively. ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY: CONTROLLING YOUR LITIGATION SPEND E-discovery is generally defined as the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, reviewing, analyzing, producing and presenting electronically stored information for legal review. The stages of e-discovery are depicted by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), which offers guidelines and standards for e-discovery consumers and providers. Recent efforts around e-discovery have focused on ways to expand electronic discovery processes into cost savings and efficiency initiatives, including early case assessment. The current strategy of in-house management of the e-discovery process is a critical step to legal enterprise management and gives corporate legal groups control over litigation costs while also reducing risk. The in-house e-discovery strategy was adopted in response to unpredictable (and some would say runaway) costs that occur when using a service provider in an outsourced, per-gigabyte e-discovery model. Consider the effects on just the processing phase of the e-discovery process: While the outsourced model helps to mitigate some risk, it comes at the detriment of cost control and matter analysis, as a single processing pass of the data can take weeks to complete. With this cost- and time- intensive model, in-house legal departments can’t predict the litigation costs associated with a given case. But by bringing the e-discovery process in house, many organizations have realized cost and risk reductions and gained control over the process. The ability of in-house counsel to iteratively process information using progressive search terms in days rather than weeks offers a level of control over the case that was impossible with the outsourced model. In-house e-discovery brings an enormous cost benefit, as a company isn’t paying for multiple passes over a set of data. Additionally, there is more time to analyze the output of your e-discovery efforts, allowing for better litigation decisions and therefore reduced risk. While bringing the e-discovery process in house offers tangible cost and risk benefits to in-house legal groups, e-discovery software solutions focus primarily on litigation cost management. But there are additional costs related to adjudicating a case that fall outside the e-discovery processes, such as interaction with outside counsel. This is typically the purview of the legal spend management solution. However, by bridging e-discovery and legal spend management information, in-house counsel gains access to all the costs associated with a matter, rather than just the outside counsel spend or just the litigation spend. This means that not only does in-house counsel now www.iltanet.org Case/Matter Management 35