These times, they are a changin’. 

It’s not exactly a rocket science pronouncement, and probably the least desirable sentence to hear from your sparkly new millennial information professional. Yet the facts remain; the way in which people use and store any kind of data has changed almost entirely from the manner in which it used to even ten years ago.

Discovery has come a long way since the regulations set forth in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure went into effect. In an age where most information is either created or stored digitally, eDiscovery has forced the FRCP to encompass the processes of discovering facts, figures, and trends from within the digital realm — a process which has only become more complex as new regulations regarding personal privacy in the electronic sphere (i.e. the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Privacy Act). And, henceforth, you have some attorneys pulled by their clients into the emerging systems of the twenty-first century legal practice, leaving the days of physical discovery boxes a fond memory of practices past.

This brave new world typically involves aggregating massive quantities of data, deduplicating it, reviewing and redacting it, and generating findings which, if you are lucky, might be of service to you and your client. These processes can prove to be an unsettling prospect to the uninitiated, who could be tempted to pick the first eDiscovery platform presented, or otherwise attempt to white knuckle it, grinding through these processes by hand and chance having results riddled with errors and omissions.

Yet, with today’s new generation of eDiscovery platforms, such worries can be somewhat mitigated, as even the most DIY eDiscovery platforms now utilize lightning fast OCR at ingestion, auto-generated indexes, and easy-to-use document and privilege review, allowing for cost savings for you and your clients. Yet, pricing can oftentimes be murky when prospecting potential eDiscovery platforms.

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Still, all is not lost. Law librarians have long been recognized as champions of the law firm, stalwart soldiers in the battle against vendor price increases and shrinking budgets. As an avowed McLuhanist, I like to quote the man himself in moments like this:

Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux… Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment within which the media function. Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you discover its operative principles and lines of force.

Marshall McLuhan

Law librarians are expert in finding, evaluating, and organizing information. More importantly, those of us in the legal information services and library management professions are uniquely positioned to be able to examine not only the media which needs ingestion, but also which sort of environment would best allow for effective consumption.

There are many ways in which eDiscovery vendor services may be evaluated to meet the specific nature of the case at hand. A really robust and sophisticated program will not serve the user well if the product is too complex to learn easily. Attorneys and paralegals have more important things to do than to spend countless hours training for a new platform. A good software solution is one that is responsive and easy to use and caters to the needs of the attorneys, who do not have time to wait for third parties to finish projects if they feel frustrated at the prospect of a lengthy indoctrination to the service platform.

SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service technologies often provide the perfect solution for small and medium sized practices. These services primarily exist in the cloud, and are maintained by the vendor to operate under the required security regulations on a continuous basis. Additionally, the majority of SaaS eDiscoveries allow for greater flexibility in contract terms so that your client will not ever have to worry about paying for services which no longer serve their initial purpose, or paying for services which are never used. 

In an era where more than 50 percent of attorneys in the US reporting an increase in discovery around social media and mobile devices in their practice, the time to begin evaluating potential eDiscovery vendors is now.