Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: JUNE 2014 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 12 Do existing tools meet your needs today? Every organization beginning the litigation support procurement process must candidly assess whether they have sufficient solutions to the burdens that arise from the EDRM. According to Gil Allouche's 2013 report, "What the Gartner Big Data 2013 Report Means for the Industry," while 64 percent of organizations have invested or plan to invest in collections of data sets large and complex enough to be termed "big data," a meager eight percent have actually done so. With particular respect to big data in discovery management, several common red flags could indicate existing tools are underperforming, including: hosting a massive amount of email or loose data not currently subject to any information management, leveraging outdated tools like no-frills keyword search as the sole answer to analysis and review, or not having a clear means to bring on more labor or better technology when unusually large cases arise. Will existing tools meet your needs tomorrow? Can you apply predictive coding capable of analyzing your data and building arguments soon after selecting a data set? As described by Ralph Losey in his 2013 article, "Predictive Coding and the Proportionality Doctrine: A Marriage Made in Big Data," e-discovery case law, trends and commentary have already paved the way for counsel to use this cost-effective emerging search tool to reduce the amount of documents identified for human review. The most salient barriers to widespread use of predictive coding technology are lack of familiarity and high per-project software costs. But will these barriers still exist in two, five, 10 or 15 years? Some vendors have already adopted new pricing plans that shift predictive coding from a per-project cost to a monthly fee that provides everything needed for comprehensive multimodal search — from keyword search to predictive coding, as described by Losey. Regarding familiarity, while many experts are in agreement that we are on the cusp of a massive transformation, a procurement decision will always circle back to basic risk assessment: What is the likelihood my organization will want to use predictive coding on a case during the lifetime of the next litigation support tool I procure? Are your tools cost-effective? Don't be fooled by the sticker price of maintaining traditional litigation management software. The true cost of maintaining any software onsite includes the cost of maintaining a server to run the application (which includes costs for power, security and maintenance), the cost to store whatever ESI is being manipulated or analyzed and the cost of contracting for personnel knowledgeable enough to run the exact version of the software you own, which includes costs of both training and labor performed. If an organization adopts any of these solutions, each new solution must be compatible with existing applications in the organization's case management workflow. This could result in additional consulting, training and processing costs. In fact, Charles Skamser's "SaaS E-DISCOVERY EVOLUTION: STREAMLINING THE DAUNTING DISCOVERY PROCESS The most salient barriers to widespread use of predictive coding technology are lack of familiarity and high per-project software costs.

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