What are the Tactics for Hiring eDiscovery vendors?
In recent years, e-Discovery vendors have increased dramatically. It may seem like a good thing to have more supplier options to choose from, but the surge in suppliers can make it difficult to distinguish between suppliers and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, it is important for law firms and legal departments that want to efficiently utilize data for litigation purposes to understand that choosing ediscovery vendors. Here are some points that are worth considering when choosing a vendor.
Is data security a vendor’s priority? Data security is an issue. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the ediscovery company has strong security measures to control data access before you hire them. Without adequate security measures, data from company/legal department clients are exposed to security vulnerabilities. In addition to evaluating the security credentials held by the vendor(for example, SOC 2 Type II), you should also inquire about prevention efforts such as intrusion detection, data encryption, cloud security control, and penetration testing, as well as employee training for the vendor.
Is innovation a priority for the publisher? Technology is continually growing, as are data sources that may be relevant to a dispute. For illustrative purposes, consider text messages. Five years ago, there were rarely text messages as an information source included in the litigation. Today, a lot of business is done by SMS. Therefore, It is essential that the provider you retain continuously innovates and develops new capabilities on a regular basis to meet the increasing amounts and varying sources of data. At a point, you want a provider whose solution(s) integrate seamlessly with modern data sources so that things like text messages are easy to collect, review, and compose.
Are vendor efficiency and automation a priority? Nothing is more frustrating than a slow or clunky review platform. If your task is to review 10,000 emails, the amount of time it takes to process data(including deduplication, deNIST, OCR)is a relevant consideration. Any small delay that occurs in the process can easily give birth to big delays, high costs, and significant concerns. Therefore, it is important to understand your supplier’s infrastructure. For example, what kinds of processes are in place to make the time from data collection to production convenient? Similarly, it’s worth talking to your existing vendor to understand all the issues that arise on the platform. For example, what about the document speed of the document load time? Artificial intelligence that can be utilized (e.g. coding prediction, clustering). Solutions should be effective, user-friendly, and easy to use.
Determine price
Price is often an important factor when choosing an affordable ediscovery vendor. Collect ballpark figures for how to compare costs in different vendor-specific situations. Not all ediscovery vendors publish prices publicly, so you may need to contact an ediscovery vendor representative or make huge research about it. In general, the time spent selecting a legal technology supplier must be proportional to the estimated cost. High cost? Consider a more rigorous screening process. A single problem with less than 25GB of data? Start and try Digital WarFare single issue for $250.
Legal professionals should do their study before hiring an e-discovery provider because no ediscovery companies are the same. While there are many areas to review before hiring, issues of security, innovation, and efficiency are critical among them. Asking thoughtful and tough problems during the audit process provides legal professionals a greater likelihood of a flawless engagement.
