Digital White Papers

I L T A S U R V E Y R E S U L T S | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 4 consistency is only as good as a stable department without much attrition. It is helpful with attorneys who know and follow processes – but sometimes we guide attorneys along the 'data integrity path' regardless of what instructions they provide; and (2) Resources are not necessarily in-house but projects are managed with small matter support in-house and outsourcing is more prevalent, which has increased risk of many isolated processes being in play. A successful out-sourcing plan includes having standard firm processes so that consistency can be achieved across case teams. I have found that having litigation support manage contracts and case close-out is a reliable way to get our involvement with outsourced matters. Great relationships usually result for the person processing invoices and lining up tasks for service providers. For the relationships with challenges, stepping in to help manage those relationships help mitigate the issues to get through those issues. We open the survey questions with perhaps the most important topic - Cost Recovery. With the increased migration to the cloud and other potential factors, the results compared to last year show the same number of firms operate litigation support as a cost center, the traditional model where law firms internalize the cost of support staying around 10%. The remainder of the respondents are an about even split between Profit center and Hybrid models. Using 2021 survey responses to establish a trend – we have the profit center model increasing to outweigh the hybrid model. For 2022 we have even numbers – and I expect cost recovery to be more popular in future surveys. The top reason for considerations to move to the cloud was, in fact, cost recovery. Over 50% of the survey respondents have already moved to the cloud. With the amount of data rising exponentially, for diverse firms the discovery management is or is becoming resource-heavy. Additionally, the traditional cost-center model where litigation support programs and data storage are folded into the overall IT budget is no longer feasible where attention is paid to the spend compared to the realization of the litigation department. Many think as I do, since the client information governance strategy is directly proportional to the discovery spend – and is not something that is controlled or impacted by the law firm - holding clients accountable in paying their way through discovery also applies that cost proportionally across the law firm spend. I L T A ' S 2 0 2 2 L I T I G A T I O N & P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T S U R V E Y R E S U L T S Security was also a significant factor in moving to the cloud - as firms consider security certifications like ISO 27001, as well as other policy implementations for best practices, the risk of having client data housed within the firm's network can become untenable. Not only have data sizes grown exponentially, but there is such risk in bringing client data in-house that cloud providers / outsourcing can be a safe and reliable alternative. I have had an attorney ask for "all email" and what arrived was a mailbox that included the 'spam' folder. My IT department called and we shut down the ingesting of that data as the data was deemed too risky. The client re-exported the mailboxes without that data and we moved forward. It cannot be stressed enough that litigation support professionals should be involved the case inception / collection stage – often times we are not, and there is often risk, cost and delay as a result. As with other timekeepers, where litigation and practice support professionals bill time for services, there is increased accountability for the profitability of the work. Often this time and/or internal costs are written off or reduced by billing attorneys. At many firms, the billing attorney may not be a litigator nor be privy to the work being

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