Maximizing Value in e-Discovery

Five Ways Corporate Counsel Can Leverage Discovery Investments  

James L. Crane, JD

When a large-scale action is brought against a corporation, its legal department must quickly evaluate its options with regard to electronic evidence discovery. Informed stakeholders must engage in cost-to-benefit analysis and make the crucial decisions that will directly affect the company and its assets. Naturally, this analysis raises many questions. What resources will be needed to properly execute the matter? How much of the process will be conducted in-house? While the answers to these questions are important, both are secondary to a perennial concern of the corporate legal department: How can the cost of litigation be controlled without sacrificing the quality of the representation?

Corporate legal departments embrace a wide variety of strategies to execute large scale actions. Some corporations consign every aspect of the litigation to their trusted outside counsel. Others utilize internal resources in their legal and information technology departments to manage much of the collection and production of data for discovery. Unfortunately, even in this age of electronic discovery and the amended federal rules, an alarming number of corporations are not adequately prepared for large-scale actions, don’t utilize technological or methodological cost saving techniques, and don’t even have formal and effective document retention policies or litigation hold protocols in place.

At Altep, we encourage our clients to be proactive. A corporation must know its capabilities, understand its information technology infrastructure, and make smart decisions to maximize its litigation budget. This article provides some useful tips to help corporate counsel effectively defend large-scale actions while realizing the greatest benefit from electronic discovery investments.