Let’s face it: Technology is taking over just about every facet of life. This is especially true in the business world, where global technology spend is skyrocketing. Companies are now modernizing their operations and pushing forward with digital transformation as they look to set themselves up to thrive in the future. According to Gartner, global IT spend is set to increase by 6.2% in 2021. What’s more, a separate study revealed that nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that organizations that don’t digitize in the next five years will fail.
As companies and end users increase technology usage, they are, in turn, creating more and more data every day. Unfortunately, while this can help organizations make better decisions, it can also introduce a lot of risk, particularly for law firms tasked with managing rising data volumes. To improve data management, legal teams are turning to electronic discovery (eDiscovery), which is currently one of the hottest legal technologies on the market—and something that every organization should have on their radar.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what eDiscovery is and why it’s vital to the future.
What Is eDiscovery?
The eDiscovery process is very similar to legal discovery. Both processes involve collecting information for use in court. While discovery deals with physical documents, eDiscovery involves collecting and managing digital information.
The term “eDiscovery” has been around since 2006, when the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to provide clarification and guidance around the requesting and sharing of digital information. Interest has been growing ever since then, with companies looking to enhance and optimize their eDiscovery capabilities.
How eDiscovery Works
Recent advancements in eDiscovery technology make the process easier and more effective than ever before. In fact, a growing number of companies are implementing cutting-edge cloud eDiscovery platforms that streamline end-to-end data management.
Cloud eDiscovery systems handle all aspects of legal discovery, enabling companies and law firms to move with greater ease and agility when preparing data for court.
What Are the Benefits of eDiscovery?
Now that you have a better idea of what eDiscovery is, let’s take a look at some of the top benefits that eDiscovery delivers to organizations like yours.
Faster Time to Court
At the end of the day, legal teams need to act immediately when receiving discovery requests. Attorneys need to meet firm deadlines. Otherwise, they risk facing court sanctions or potentially even losing cases.
By using cloud eDiscovery platforms, teams can produce data faster and more efficiently, leaving more time for analyzing data and preparing arguments. In turn, this increases the chances you get the legal outcomes you’re going for.
Data Culling
Large-scale court cases often involve massive amounts of data, which can be impossible to sort through. In most cases, legal teams have to sift through tons of documents, which takes a considerable amount of time.
By using a robust eDiscovery platform, companies quickly and seamlessly break down large data sets into digestible samples. This helps legal teams make data-driven decisions faster.
Secure Storage
Law firms need to go above and beyond to protect sensitive data. Clients trust law firms to protect their information and maintain secrecy. After all, data breaches can carry severe repercussions—one of the worst being the loss of customer trust.
Luckily, legal teams can use eDiscovery platforms to centralize data and clamp down on access control and storage. As a result, they can increase the chances that bad actors don’t compromise sensitive data.
Cost Savings
Legacy IT solutions can be very costly. Not only can they be expensive to maintain and upgrade, they can also require ongoing attention from IT workers or partnering managed service providers.
Switching to a cloud eDiscovery platform eliminates hefty CapEx and OpEx, putting more money back into IT budgets.
Why eDiscovery Is Important
The many benefits of eDiscovery translate into a number of advantages for organizations.
Attract More Clients
The legal industry is competitive. Oftentimes, clients meet with multiple attorneys before selecting the one they ultimately do business with.
Law firms can use eDiscovery to differentiate their services to potential clients. Attorneys can demonstrate that their firms are using the latest software, proving to clients that they’re more efficient thanks to faster processing speeds, stronger data analysis, and fewer errors.
Reduce Turnover
Word is quickly spreading about eDiscovery, which is driving demand from legal aides and discovery specialists.
As a result, companies need to offer the latest eDiscovery technologies to attract and retain top legal talent. This will be increasingly important over the next few years, as more groups and universities offer eDiscovery certification programs.
Improve Court Performance
Court cases are won and lost because of preparation. This being the case, attorneys need to be able to quickly sort through data to discover trends and form arguments.
By using eDiscovery platforms, attorneys can have total visibility over client data through one user-friendly portal. This prevents critical documents from getting misplaced—and puts the attorney in the best possible position to study the data and decide how to proceed.
Tips for Transitioning to eDiscovery
Legal teams should avoid rushing into eDiscovery. Keep these tips in mind to ensure a smooth transition.
Analyze Your Current Discovery Process
Most teams have an established process for discovery and eDiscovery. Before making any changes, it’s a good idea to analyze your process and find out what’s working and what can be improved.
Educate End Users
It’s also important to obtain end-user buy-in. Teams that aren’t having any trouble with the discovery process—or are oblivious to the problems they’re having—may push back about using a new type of technology. After all, employees can get set in their ways.
As such, administrators should strongly consider training and certifying end users to upskill them and get them excited about working with a new and powerful technology.
It’s also important to remind end users that eDiscovery can make their jobs easier. This, in turn, allows them to spend less time on grunt work, giving them more time to spend on legal analysis and review (which is what most professionals want to be doing in the first place!).
Form a Data Governance Strategy
Before adding a cloud eDiscovery platform, it’s a good idea to tighten data governance and set identity access management (IAM) policies. This strategy can protect data and accounts and prevent security violations.
Find the Right Vendor
The legal eDiscovery market is growing at a 6.6% clip each year, as many new providers continue to enter into the space. With so many options to choose from, it’s important to test the market, demo platforms, and read about various eDiscovery solutions. Remember that different vendors offer different levels of security, customer support, flexibility, and billing options.
At the end of the day, the eDiscovery platform you select will play a massive role in your department. So it’s important to find a reliable and trustworthy vendor with a robust, feature-rich platform that’s intuitive by design.
Venio: Your One-Stop Shop for eDiscovery
Venio is a leading eDiscovery provider that is the driving force behind the VenioOne platform.
VenioOne handles every phase of eDiscovery—from early case assessment through digital production. By moving to Venio, legal teams can stop using disparate discovery platforms and centralize the process in a user-friendly cloud platform that can be securely accessed from any location.
The platform is also highly scalable, making it perfect for organizations of all sizes, from growing startups to large enterprises.
Ready to Make the Leap to eDiscovery?
When you take a look at what’s happening in the legal industry, it’s obvious that things are changing. Like all other industries, more and more legal processes are being digitized and transformed through the cloud. And, truth be told, this is a trend that is just getting started.
Organizations that resist digital transformation stand little chance of competing in the coming years. As more and more firms begin investing in purpose-built eDiscovery solutions to streamline back-end operations, those that don’t will be left in the dust.
Interested in keeping your organization ahead of the curve? Request a demo of Venio today.
This post was written by Justin Reynolds. Justin is a freelance writer who enjoys telling stories about how technology, science, and creativity can help workers be more productive. In his spare time, he likes seeing or playing live music, hiking, and traveling.
