Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: JUNE 2014 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 18 FITTING AN E-DISCOVERY SOLUTION TO MEET THE NEEDS OF A WORKFLOW: OUTSOURCED/MANAGED SERVICES 1. To begin, the review committee developed a list of required features. By utilizing their experience with other discovery review applications hosted with third-party vendors, all participants contributed to the list and then ranked each feature as "must have" or "nice to have." 2. Once the list of requirements was compiled, the review committee identified seven industry- leading discovery review platforms based on their ability to meet those requirements. Demos of the initial seven software tools were reviewed only by the practice support team; they were to ensure the features available closely aligned with the review committee's list of features. This step eliminated three of the seven platforms considered. 3. Next came the deep-dive demos, which gave the entire committee the opportunity to see the four remaining tools in action. One requirement for the practice support group was ease of transition to the new tool. These demos gave the committee an opportunity to evaluate the usability of each potential program. A list of scenarios was provided to the demonstrator to show how, if possible, the tool would perform in meeting the desired goal. In this step, committee members also spoke with other firms using three of the four platforms (one of the platforms had not been released yet). This gave them a client-side view and was quite informative. After scoring each platform for its ability to meet the requirements and speaking with other firms, the committee decided on kCura's Relativity discovery review platform. Incorporating new enterprise-level software into a firm's environment is never a simple plug-and-play procedure, so Smith's department needed to determine how to implement the solution. 4. This led to a feasibility and budgeting phase. Jones Walker's IT department, specifically the infrastructure team, worked with kCura to determine hardware and software requirements, which led to the calculation of licensing and related expenditures: processing and storage servers, Microsoft OS, SQL licensing, backup licensing and Relativity licensing. After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Jones Walker had established a disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) co-location site for switchover and replication of their systems, so they included this cost in their implementation and maintenance budget. Personnel expenses also went into the budget. To ensure client success, kCura requires a certified Relativity administrator at each installation site. Jones Walker would need to either train a member of its practice support staff or hire this expert at a considerable expense. The Jones Walker team also knew it would be costly to build out a separate infrastructure to host an industry-leading platform; they just didn't realize how costly it would be for their specific setup. Rather than abandoning the idea of moving to Relativity, they looked for alternatives to purchasing and maintaining the infrastructure themselves. 5. Smith researched alternative delivery methods and came upon the managed services, IaaS, approach. The search for a managed services hosting provider began. First, e-discovery service providers that had previously hosted projects for the firm were contacted. While one was willing to be of assistance, none had experience with providing managed services, and the transition to a new system had to be smooth if it were to gain acceptance from the business. At Jones Walker's request, kCura provided a list of partners providing managed services. The practice support department looked at all aspects of the managed services offerings to find a partner that would best serve their firm's discovery needs. STEPS TO IDENTIFY THE RIGHT SOLUTION The review committee designed a five-step process to evaluate existing and potential tools. (Note: While the new e-discovery solution ultimately included services, because of the decision to keep all processing in-house, services were not included in the evaluation. This was an assessment of software only.)

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