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Chaotic Case-by-Case Project Management
“Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning. ” ' Peter Singer
The legal industry should pay attention to Singer's words of caution. Across the nation, there exists a relatively untested notion that the only approach to e-discovery is case-by-case ' that every unique case requires an equally unique approach to discovery. While this phenomenon is a natural component of any industry seeking standardization, the unfortunate byproduct can be seen when organizations incur great costs to marry pre-existing on-premise solutions with whatever contracted-for solution is required to react to the case that came down the pipe today.
For many organizations, this whirlwind cycle of piecemeal adoption has created a lot of inefficiency, especially considering that several aspects of the organizations' existing cases could support the concept of a long-term, comprehensive portfolio management approach to e-discovery ' one that is designed to minimize data transfers, decrease the amount of stored instances of documents, and provide everything needed for e-discovery in one place. In fact, for those brave enough to take off their blinders, the ties binding seemingly one-off e-discovery projects become clear:
- Duplicative documents. Corporations and law firms that support long-term clients often reuse documents (e.g., merger and acquisition agreements, insurance documents, contract versions, etc.) in simultaneous or consecutive litigation. However, if a firm could isolate batches of documents potentially subject to repeat litigation in a post-processing universal database, when and if these are requested again, there would not be a need to re-identify, re-collect, or re-process this data.
- Repeat custodians. Just like a contract may appear in multiple cases, so too do serial custodians like C-level executives, HR managers and product developers. In a similar vein, if electronically stored information (ESI) associated with these personnel resided in a suspended state of storage that spanned multiple matters, the time spent collecting and manipulating this ESI could be reduced ' creating a fast track for analysis and review.
- Overlapping tools. From a functionality perspective, very few differences currently separate the tools the industry uses for the stages on the right side of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). Everything from keyword search to predictive coding can potentially add value during both analysis, and later, review. It is worth wondering why so many organizations purchase separate tools with overlapping purposes, complacently subjecting the organization to additional data transfer, and perhaps even additional processing.
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