Early Case Assessment Tools and its Importance

Early case assessment tools enable service providers to help customers cut the amount of data subject to expensive review and analysis during e-discovery.
The increased legal burden introduced by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is driving your customers to improve their legal risk management practices to contain costs related to e-discovery. Early case assessment (ECA) tools can support this goal, and storage service providers have a good opportunity to gain e-discovery business by selling and servicing early case assessment tools
For those involved in e-discovery, there are best practices to guide the process. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) lays out the phases of an e-discovery project. Two phases of the EDRM model -- review and analysis -- consume much of the e-discovery budget at companies involved in litigation. These two phases require specialized software and attorney interaction, work that's best left to companies such as Stratify Inc. or your customer's legal department.
So where do service providers fit into this equation? You can add value to the e-discovery process by reducing the amount of data that needs to undergo review and analysis. ECA tools are the mechanism to cut the amount of data to be reviewed.
Early case assessment can reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information. Contact ediscovery solutions or ediscovery companies for more info.

Defined Standard eDiscovery processes

Controlling eDiscovery costs requires a holistic business approach to active litigation. For effective review oversight, corporations need to define process and monitor activity without interrupting law firms’ ability to execute. What is needed is a single system that provides centralized administration and distributed secure access while capturing process analytics. Standardization process is an important aspect.

In order to monitor across reviews, standards must be applied. This seems intuitive even without the oversight goal, since approaching each matter anew with different training, a different collections methodology, and different production authorization is inefficient and risky. Gaps in process can mean wasted time or worse, inadvertent production or summary judgment. So even without the goal of oversight, standardization makes sense. Consult internally or with lead outside counsel to define standards for all matters or per line of business, and then monitor these standards and their affect on review to produce real savings. Examples of standards include:

• Consistent review technology – select a ediscovery software to reduce training costs and billable vendor evaluations and simplify administration and oversight
• Chain of custody and media tracking – define set chain of custody and media tracking, then requiring adherence to eliminate spoliation on every matter
• Security protocols – protect all cases from unintentional access
• Review workflow – minimize gaps in review which may result in inadvertent productions or inefficiency
• Production authorization – ensure each production has been checked for conflicts and consistency prior to shipping, regardless of counsel or case size

Standardization lowers costs and risk while improving the ability of internal project managers to manage more cases and outside counsel to spend less time managing review. You can try out eDiscovery companies with good eDiscovery softwares.