I
n-house legal departments are increasingly
regaining control over their e-discovery processes
and matters. As of last year, roughly half of legal
teams had insourced their e-discovery, and
Gartner predicts that legal departments will triple
their spend on in-house legal technology by 2025. These
shifts signal a growing desire among in-house legal teams
to increase budget predictability and bolster the level of
internal oversight and control they have when partnering
with outside providers.
This push toward self-
sufficiency is working well for
many legal teams, especially
those that have sophisticated
in-house counsel and legal
operations professionals who can
manage technology deployments,
optimize workflows and enable
self-sufficiency for the majority
of e-discovery matters. Yet there
is still a need for "burst capacity,"
to scale-up quickly when a large
investigation hits, or a complex
matter extends beyond the realm
of internal expertise.
Legal departments need a way to establish e-discovery
processes that strike an effective balance between in-
house and outsourced ownership. With a few key building
blocks, teams can establish strong in-house control, contain
legal spend and enable agility to scale efforts up and
down as needed. My team's work supporting e-discovery
within large, multi-national corporations has revealed
several foundational pieces that are often in place among
organizations that are successfully improving in-house
e-discovery accountability and budgeting. These include:
• Centralized team and budget. Cohesiveness is critical
in streamlining internal e-discovery processes. It's not
uncommon for large organizations to have numerous,
disparate teams all working on different initiatives
or portions of the business under the broader legal
umbrella. This can lead to a significant disconnect
when trying to standardize the tools, providers and
procedures used for e-discovery. Without a central
playbook and decision-makers, legal departments will
continue to spend excessively on outside providers and
be stuck without a way to track,
scale or measure their e-discovery
programs. Still, balance is
important—central playbooks and
e-discovery "rules" shouldn't be
so stringent that they eliminate all
flexibility. Rather, teams should
have a degree of autonomy—
within the bounds of the central
guidelines—to manage processes
according to their unique needs
and challenges.
• Healthy mix of in-house
and third-party expertise. In an
ideal scenario, the internal team should have the skills
and the bandwidth to be able to handle targeted internal
investigations and small matters without outside
service providers. It's important for in-house counsel
to have the ability to conduct straightforward data
collections, use basic workflows in e-discovery review
platforms and manage projects. The tipping point for
when outside providers are brought in—typically for
complex, specialized and/or large matters—will vary
between different organizations depending on the size,
skills and expertise of the internal team.
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I L T A N E T . O R G
"Cohesiveness
is critical in
streamlining
internal
e-discovery
processes."
