Learn More About eDiscovery Software
What is eDiscovery Software?
eDiscovery software, or electronic discovery software, handles the discovery process for electronic information prior to civil or criminal legal proceedings. eDiscovery tools identify, collect, and produce electronically stored information (ESI) for use in a lawsuit or investigation. Common features of eDiscovery solutions include legal hold, early case assessment, document collection, document production, document processing, and document review. More robust solutions offer analytics and data visualization tools to help legal teams understand the data.
eDiscovery solutions search for and collect documents and data, quickly export and analyze information, share files with colleagues and clients, integrate with other software tools to streamline processes, and maintain the security of files and data.
The eDiscovery industry, including eDiscovery services, has exploded in the past couple of years. The increase in popularity is due to several reasons, with the two major ones being the improvement in the technology powering eDiscovery solutions and the increase in the number of documents housed digitally. eDiscovery solutions save law firms and legal departments time and money by streamlining legal teams’ workflow for ESI, which has expanded far beyond email to include dozens of types of admissible documents. The major use cases include criminal and civil litigation, internal investigations driven by regulatory oversight, public information requests, and data privacy maintenance (especially relevant given GDPR and the increased focus on privacy).
The technology relies on optical character recognition (OCR) and predictive coding, which refers to the application’s process of combing through a subset of documents for relevant information based on input from the user and making a determination as to what qualifies. The rise in predictive coding, which integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into the eDiscovery workflow, has improved the utility of eDiscovery applications and led to wider adoption.
There are several use cases for eDiscovery software, with the major ones being as follows:
Legal hold: eDiscovery can track and create auditable trails for users’ legal holds.
Early case assessment: The early stages of a case are crucial to shaping the future development of litigation proceedings. eDiscovery tools give the legal team the ability to organize, tag, and prioritize large swaths of unstructured data.
Discovery projects: eDiscovery solutions ensure that the discovery period is as painless as possible while maintaining document security and compliance.
Internal investigations: eDiscovery software can be used by legal teams in internal investigation cases to gather and digest as much information as possible without being obtrusive. Legal, compliance, and HR teams can all utilize the software to gather relevant documents that get to the heart of a dispute.
Third-party subpoenas: eDiscovery software can help businesses respond to government and third-party subpoenas quickly and easily. These solutions gather relevant documents and get them to the necessary parties.
Document production: These solutions create documents in various formats, organize relevant files, and create privilege logs so that document production is quick and easy for legal teams.
What are the Common Features of eDiscovery Software?
The following are some core features within eDiscovery software that can help users:
Document collection: eDiscovery software collects documents from various data sources while producing an auditable trail.
Data processing: The software processes electronic documents and extracts relevant information via metadata combing, native application imaging, and domain parsing. The user feeds data to the engine, and the application processes it, preparing it for legal review.
Document review: eDiscovery software processes documents and extracts relevant information via metadata combing, native application imaging, and domain parsing.
Permissioned access: The solution Isolates and protects privileged or password-protected documents to allow only the access necessary.
Project analytics: It analyzes discovery projects and produces data visualizations based on available project information. These tools can help analyze discovery projects and produce data visualizations to help legal professionals get a better understanding of what the data says.
Legal hold: eDiscovery software automates the process of preserving ESI relevant to anticipated litigation.
Document production: Document production is a key feature of eDiscovery software. Legal professionals set up their application to trawl through and select relevant documents based on key indicators such as specific words or phrases. eDiscovery tools highlight the relevant ESI and get it ready for the legal process post discovery.
Assisted review: By leveraging the assisted review feature of an eDiscovery platform, legal professionals can improve the accuracy of document review and ensure that they’re not missing relevant information.
Case dynamics and transcripts: Some eDiscovery platforms provide users with tools that house case documents and create links between different legal documents. Transcripts can be linked to disparate case documents, and new information can be added and analyzed as the case develops.
Auto-detection of privileged materials: eDiscovery software typically combs through relevant ESI to identify and flag privileged documents so the team does not waste time on them.
Some eDiscovery solutions also include:
User reporting: The solution tracks and reports on reviewer activity for specific projects.
Project templates: The software provides templates for different project types.
Automated review: eDiscovery software leverages machine learning to automatically review and analyze documents under review.
Data visualization: Certain eDiscovery solutions contain data visualization tools, which help legal professionals grasp the information and story presented by specific data sets.
Real-time chain of custody: This feature refers to the auditable trail of digital fingerprints left on legal documents by the eDiscovery application.
What are the Benefits of eDiscovery Software?
Streamline the discovery process: Legal professionals use eDiscovery software to streamline the discovery process. What was previously an arduous process, painstakingly combing through thousands of documents by hand, has now been vastly improved by the introduction of AI-powered eDiscovery software. The majority of law firms are moving litigation operations, specifically eDiscovery activities, in house. This shift means an increase in the amount of work for in-house legal teams and therefore an increase in the need for efficient processes and automation.
Cost and time savings: A major reason for using eDiscovery software is to save time and costs during the discovery process. These solutions allow law firms to save time by providing simultaneous keyword search in multiple locations, automatic deduplication of search results, permission-based filtering of search results, indexing, retrieval of unindexed items, automated redaction, and archiving of documents. As the amount of ESI has skyrocketed, discovery costs responded accordingly. AI-powered eDiscovery solutions have helped to keep costs down while improving accuracy and data collection efficiency.
eDiscovery software implementation saves legal teams time and allows them to cut down on costs associated with document review, early case assessment, and all discovery-related tasks. The myth that manual, human document review is more accurate than computer-assisted review seems to have died out, as mounds of empirical evidence supporting the incredible accuracy of eDiscovery solutions in identifying relevant documents has eliminated the support of reasonable observers. Multiple studies have been completed comparing human document review accuracy and automated document review, and the automated systems easily outpaced the human-generated numbers.
Who Uses eDiscovery Software?
Legal professionals use eDiscovery software. As eDiscovery software improves, it is becoming easier for in-house legal teams to utilize these platforms instead of hiring external eDiscovery firms.
Law firms: Lawyers and paralegals within law firms are the two largest user groups of eDiscovery software. Lawyers may not interact as directly with these solutions, but they rely on the information that is gleaned, organized, and presented in a digestible format.
Legal departments: In-house corporate legal departments are the other large user group for eDiscovery solutions. These teams use the software to handle investigations, litigation, and audits. Legal departments can register, upload, normalize, analyze, evaluate, share, and store relevant data gathered by eDiscovery tools to aid in their audits and investigations.
Software Related to eDiscovery Software
Related solutions that can be used together with eDiscovery software include:
Legal practice management software: eDiscovery solutions often integrate with legal practice management software, which helps law firms have a comprehensive solution for cases involving eDiscovery.
Legal case management software: Legal case management solutions, also known as matter management solutions, handle legal cases for law firms and legal departments. eDiscovery tools often integrate with legal case management software.
Challenges with eDiscovery Software
Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Proper integrations: For an eDiscovery tool to be as useful as possible, it needs to integrate with and collect data from a wide variety of sources. Microsoft Office 365 is the most common integration because historically most ESI has been emails, but as the types of legally permissible documents increase, eDiscovery solutions need to be able to collect data from them.
Sensitive data: eDiscovery tools deal with sensitive data management, so the security standards should be robust. Data security, particularly in cloud environments where the onus on security falls to the vendors operating there, is especially important in an age of increased cyberattacks.
Which Companies Should Buy eDiscovery Software?
Law firms, companies with legal departments, and governments could all benefit from the purchase of eDiscovery software.
Corporations: Corporate legal departments that implement eDiscovery solutions are able to leverage those tools to handle disputes and investigations in house, as well as speed up data collection.
Law firms: Law firms big and small can benefit from adopting eDiscovery software. With these tools, they are able to move discovery work in house and keep that share of the billable hours for document review.
Government organizations: Government agencies that implement eDiscovery tools can handle record requests faster and more easily, as well as deal with litigation dockets and the necessary document review and production.
How to Buy eDiscovery Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for eDiscovery Software
In order to compile a suitable long list of potential eDiscovery tools, the prospective buyer must determine how many matters and how much data per matter they are likely to handle. Pricing structures vary across vendors, so making sure buyers eliminate vendors with structures that would be prohibitively expensive is a good starting point. The buyer should also look at the feature set offered by the vendor and how robust the underlying technology is. If the product meets all of the feature requirements and are within a price range, then it can be added to the list.
The prospective buyer should also assess the number of users and their familiarity with similar solutions. Will they be able to take advantage of a solution long on robust analytical tools and comprehensive features? Or are they better suited to a basic tool to help collect and cull the initial document cache? Once a buyer determines the priority of their requirements, they can move on to compiling a long list of choices.
Compare eDiscovery Software Products
Create a long list
Prospective buyers should cull any products that they know do not meet the basic criteria that they put together during their requirements gathering. They should compile a standardized list of questions based on those requirements to ask vendors during initial conversations.
Create a short list
Prospective buyers should send out RFIs and look at the responses to help compile a short list. Research reports and user reviews are a great way to vet solutions that make the short list and look promising.
Conduct demos
Only vendors that make the shortlist of possible solutions should be asked for demos. Prospective buyers should ask for live demos and go in with a specific type of scenario or list scenarios typical to their business to demonstrate the systems’ effectiveness. If pricing is not transparent, the law firm or company should ask for pricing details.
Selection of eDiscovery Software
Choose a selection team
The actual users of the software should be included in the selection team to gauge usability. A member of the finance team should join wherever possible, and a technical lead should join the team to deal with specifics around systems integrations and security.
Negotiation
The negotiation process will take place between the buyer and a few vendors selected from the short list. Price will be important at this stage, and decision makers will weigh potential return on investment (ROI) given the cost and time savings provided by the solution as well as the number of matters expected per year. The final decision is typically based on the available data and information gleaned from the buying process, and made by the selection team.
What Does eDiscovery Software Cost?
eDiscovery solutions vary widely in how they are priced. Some vendors use a pay-as-you-go, usage-based model, while some price their product with a pay-per-matter model and others a time-based subscription model. The traditional method of pricing from companies providing eDiscovery services is line item pricing, where the client pays for each service on the a-la-carte menu.
Return on Investment (ROI)
There are a few ways to calculate the ROI on an eDiscovery solution. One is to calculate the reduction in discovery data by looking at the document review rate and the hourly cost of outside reviewers. Then, buyers must consider the deduplication rate of the solution and the reduction in reviewable documents after early case assessment (ECA) and the additional culling the eDiscovery solution does. Next step entails subtracting the amount of money required for document review post eDiscovery, culling from the amount that would’ve been required absent any culling, and then, the buyer will have a solid estimate of cost savings. Teams can look at ROI in terms of time saved per matter that would have otherwise been spent on unnecessary document review.
eDiscovery Software Trends
The legal industry has seen widespread adoption of eDiscovery software in the past few years, leading to a large swath of legal firms and departments moving their eDiscovery process in house.
Cloud-based solutions
As in most industries, vendors are moving from on-premises software to building and delivering solutions in the cloud. eDiscovery is no exception, and the fact that operations are now in the cloud means that it’s easier than ever to expand the number of integrations with related document storage systems or matter management solutions.
AI-driven discovery
Improvements in AI have expanded the breadth of functionality for eDiscovery. AI is making eDiscovery faster and more accurate, delivering more ROI to users and providing more data-driven insights into relevant documents.
Analytics and data visualization
Another trend in the eDiscovery space is solutions offering more robust analytics and data visualization tools. Legal professionals want documents reviewed and analyzed but are looking for additional data visualization features to help them understand the information they’ve found on a deeper level.
