Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/25416
steps in their own silos. The reality of this comes down to finding the best solution to address the challenge you have whether you’re a firm attorney looking for the best solution for document review or a corporate lawyer looking for information management, identification and legal hold solutions. Ultimately, you’ve got to have a seamless way to share information.” APPLICATION INTEGRATION TO ACHIEVE INTEROPERABILITY Bill Ives at The FASTForward Blog says, “[enterprises] cannot expect to end up with a single provider.” His conclusion? Application integration is paramount. With this in mind, it’s a safe bet that interoperability will become a more recognized term in the next year and that open integrations will be seen as a critical factor for success. More and more software providers will build application programming interfaces (APIs) and connectors into their technology to meet market demand for integrated e-discovery solutions. The day you find out that the solution you’ve selected for a particular task won’t interface well with other e-discovery software solutions is not a happy day. This is especially alarming when one considers the sticker price of the application and efforts made to gain buy-in from the business and IT departments and achieve cross-departmental process implementation. The importance of interoperability was emphasized by Ralph Losey, a Partner at Jackson Lewis LLP and E-Discovery Team leader, in a webcast predicting e-discovery trends for 2011: “[Interoperability] definitely should be on the checklist. You should be very cautious about using any product that can’t flow through and export out to another 46 Litigation and Practice Support ILTA White Paper product. In today’s world that’s just a must; you’ve got to have it or you move on to something else.” SELECTING E-DISCOVERY SOFTWARE There are, of course, other concerns when shopping for an e-discovery software vendor, but the importance of interoperability supports a general guideline: software should be doing most of the work for you. Two specific capabilities to look for are open integration with the myriad software applications in daily use, and automated business process management. With open integration, legal departments win the ability to maintain their organization’s current technology investments, which can amount to a huge cost savings. With automated business process management, legal can relieve itself of much of the burden of coordinating projects that can span multiple organizational silos and dozens or hundreds of matters. So what should savvy attorneys look for in e-discovery software? Although no one checklist can possibly cover every facet of a process as complex as purchasing legal process management software, the following are a few recommendations: • Legal project management: It is essential to have the ability to seamlessly move data and tasks through the entire lifecycle of the EDRM. • Interoperability with current and future EDRM tools: This can be enabled through integrations, APIs, Web services, or through an open integration software platform. • Robust support structure and services: This should include the often-difficult implementation and user adoption phases.