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- For the legal technology world, a “maybe” question becomes an “urgent” question: how to do you evaluate remote eDiscovery services?
For the legal technology world, a “maybe” question becomes an “urgent” question: how to do you evaluate remote eDiscovery services?
Katrina Conti
Head of Operations
The Posse List
27 March 2020 (Paris, France) – Within the last couple of weeks, the coronavirus has spawned a deluge: multiple press releases (by competing eDiscovery providers) extolling the virus of their remote collection and review capabilities.
We have tended to be agnostic when it comes to remote review since we have 980 eDiscovery staffing agencies and vendors posting jobs with us. But we can say, without pissing off that vendor list because all will acknowledge it, that there are only two entities … the HaystackID group and the Lateral Link group … that have had remote review capabilities long in place. For years we have been posting their remote document review projects and remote substantive projects.
This flurry of announcements is important since it may precede the “new normal”: the value, importance, and necessity of remote eDiscovery capabilities. But law firms and in-house corporate legal departments have been finding these announcements often fall short of intended results. The vendors can certainly scale their technologies immediately. But the big thing: not being able to take that experience to scale remote capabilities immediately.
And that’s the tricky bit because experience is a function of time and applied knowledge.
So we decided to go to the Sensei Master, Rob Robinson, publisher of Complex Discovery, and get a read on the Good, the Bad, the Ugly.
Before we do that, let’s scan the “experience” areas:
- Experience with remote technology
- Experience with remote security
- Experience with remote teams
- Experience with remote processes
- Experience with remote communications
- Experience with remote troubleshooting
We took that list to Rob and his thoughts were as follows:
Competitive providers may be able to purchase awareness or announce capability, however, it takes time and the actual successful conduct of projects for them to gain experience. This experience needs to be achieved on multiple levels for clients to translate the promise of remote services into the actual achievement of desired results in support of audits, investigations, and litigation. I think you need to look at the levels of “experience” as follows:
- Experience of organizations with remote services
- Experience of management teams with remote services
- Experience of individuals with remote services
So that is your template: read the press releases, but then use the above criteria to see if the skills in the press release really bear out and meet your need. At the end of the day it’s the same process you’ll take evaluating any any legal technology: consider, compare, and choose the service provider carefully.
Because here is the issue: while organizations may be able to scale their technologies and remote capabilities immediately, they cannot scale their experience in the use of technologies and remote capabilities immediately.
If, as both Martin Nikel and Rob both say, we are looking at “the new normal” then all of these considerations are important. All vendors will “sex up” their announcements. It is up to the eDiscovery decision makes to really see if the demonstrated experience is there before they make that critical remote service choice.