With eDiscovery vendors, it isn’t “One Size Fits All”

Is this your eDiscovery vendor? (Stock photo.)

I was on a pleasant-but-tense call the other day with two representatives of a major discovery vendor.  We were discussing their recent invoices to an attorney from an eight-attorney firm, for a case with around 125 GB of data.

There were a few communication failures in the project that ran up costs, and we talked them over and arrived at a reasonable discount.  But I had another concern.

We’d collected broadly—essentially, every potentially relevant scrap of data the leanly staffed client company had on hand—and loaded the results into an Early Case Assessment (ECA) database for analysis.  ECA is a low-cost option for preserving data at a low cost per gigabyte while running simplified analyses to decide what is worth putting reviewer eyes on or running through analytics.

We were promoting data out of the ECA into a full review database based on search terms, date ranges, and participants.  I identified the materials to be promoted by saving searches and, because there was no option to promote the materials myself, sharing those search results to our project manager.  Two days after each request, that data would finally arrive in the review database. 

For one such promotion, more than a month into the project, the vendor’s invoice reflected the following time:  1 hour to “create specifications and requirements for promoting documents to document review database,” and 1.1 hours to “review loaded documents against requirements; notify client of results and provide summary.”

For context, in some tools, promotion from ECA to Review is a process that requires only a few clicks by the user.  I’d identified every document I needed, and they had already been processed. At this rate and with this time at each end, I had determined that any cost savings on hosting charges from using the ECA were being eclipsed by the man-hours required to promote the necessary data.

“Why?”  I asked.  The vendor representative admitted he could have done the promotion from his personal laptop in minutes, given the right permissions.  But, he said, his team is set up to work on enormous cases with millions of documents.  In those cases, an error based on sloppy communication can cost millions or result in sanctions.  The project management team must take the time to provide the engineering team with perfect detail about the task, so the engineering team can execute it, and then the project management team must make sure the task was done correctly. 

You don’t cut corners when you’re turning an aircraft carrier around at sea. 

This case was not small to the attorney or to the client, but it was more of a missile boat than an aircraft carrier. And the attorney and I were steering the strategic decisions around the review.  But this vendor was telling us, quite clearly, that they were the wrong choice for our “small” case.  In the words of the attorney: “Our vendor is saying, ‘We’re too inefficient and labor-intensive for clients who care about value for expense!’ ”

And I’ll be honest: Even when I worked in Biglaw on “aircraft carrier” cases, I didn’t know a single litigator who was happy waiting two days to get their hands on new data.

Fortunately, there are great alternatives for nimble, effective eDiscovery. For savvy users, there are self-service platforms that let you push the button yourself. For those without access to an eDiscovery nerd among their senior associates and support staff, there are “boutique” vendors who provide without multiple layers of middle management. (And Spark is a fractional senior associate and full-time eDiscovery nerd, just a call away!)

Spark is not tied to one platform, software product, or vendor, and we work hard to understand your needs and capabilities to identify the right solution for your firm or project.  Give us a call to learn about options that fit you.