Digital White Papers

50 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Ediscovery Managed Services Fighting Prejudice When a move to a new firm provided the opportunity to migrate away from a system of legacy ediscovery tools, I resolved to plug many holes that had long vexed me. It did not take long, though, before new concerns arose, including the scalability of both technology and process and the need for near-instantaneous expertise in the new application. From my myopic, data-centric vantage, handling the data all day every day seemed the best and probably only way to generate expertise, extract and extrapolate critical information, and forestall larger problems. Given bigger and beer tools, the internal staff could provide solutions on a scale previously impossible (or prohibitively expensive). Externalized solutions might help reduce "buon-pushing" and refocus us on consulting and providing solutions. The cloud could only ever be a dream of unicorns and rainbows, right? I greatly preferred internal provisioning, but I grudgingly began to accept the pragmatic view that most internal solutions would not work at our projected scale. Internal staff could implement workflows and QC procedures to ensure the data-driven frustrations of the past would be dealt with preemptively, but initially we would not know the new soware well enough to spot pitfalls. The internal learning curve would be huge. My IS director did not have the same vendor-related bias I had and nudged me to use an outside hosting solution, but my long-held prejudices kept nagging me. All the lessons painfully gleaned from years in the data trenches convinced me it was inconceivable that a vendor would go along with our workflows; the dark side, aer all, has its own objectives and documentation. it offered ediscovery professionals. I had the impression that the cloud was likely not a viable long-term solution for ediscovery in law firms. As a product of my environment, this seemed like a natural conclusion: the cloud and law firms were like oil and water. Aorneys wanted people they knew and trusted –– not ASPs –– handling their and their clients' data. My experience with vendor errors also created a prejudice, formed and reinforced by years of problems with vendor- provided scanning, processing and production deliverables; external- internal communication gaps; and vendor-hosted soware issues. For me, vendors epitomized the dark side. Industry-wide trends such as technology improvements and generally accepted best practices mitigated some concerns, but ultimately did lile to alleviate my anxiety. Neither geing clients to provide less data nor post-collection scoping and culling panned out as consistently as anyone wanted. As the volume of paper and electronically stored information grew, something had to give. Despair, insanity or a major career change seemed inevitable. The cloud could only ever be a dream of unicorns and rainbows, right?

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