Two new tools can help rein in eDiscovery spending

As we enter the season of our discontent, shareholders and other interested parties will be angry, frustrated and looking for someone to blame for the Wall Street meltdown and the sub-prime mortgage mess. What's more, increasingly intense regulatory scrutiny is most likely on the way. These are just some of the factors that should encourage you to get your eDiscovery house in order. When you go looking for information in an eDiscovery process, it can be an expensive and time-consuming exercise, but two new tools could help you control costs (or at least begin to get a handle on them).

CaseCentral Enterprise eDiscovery Dashboard

CaseCentral recently released an analytics dashboard that lets you define and measure the document review part of the eDiscovery process. Steve d’Alencon, CMO at CaseCentral, explains that you can review the entire process using metrics such as who has access to documents, if the project is tracking to budget and how efficient the reviewers have been. This provides you with an element of control over a process, which is typically open ended. It also gives you the ability to compare outside counsel to see which firm is operating most efficiently, says d'Alencon. "It gives you a rich set of data to allow you to measure the effectiveness and cost [of the litigation process] and manage resources tightly," he says.

Recommind Insite™ Legal Hold

Craig Carpenter, VP and general counsel at search vendor Recommind explains, "Whenever you are sued or think you are going to be sued or investigated by the SEC or Justice Department, your company has a legal obligation to retain any evidence. The process of preserving data is called a legal hold." To aid in the process of identifying content to include in the legal hold, Recommind recently released a new product called Insite Legal Hold, which enables enterprises to quickly and accurately explore information where it resides-–before it is collected and placed on hold in response to an investigation or lawsuit.

This is an important distinction says Carpenter because the typical discovery process casts too wide a net and provides investigators with more information than the enterprise is required to give, a situation that Carpenter says, "keeps corporate counsel up at night." The impetus for this product, he says, was that enterprises have been spending too much money on eDiscovery and budgets can't continue to grow. "I would love to say [Insite Legal Hold] was our idea," Carpenter says, "but it came from our customers who said 'the grab everything approach is killing us.'"

It's clear that as the volume of content grows in house, you need to manage it on a number of levels including pure content management (knowing what you have and where it is), search (the ability to find that content wherever it is) and analytics (the ability to understand how the content is being used). eDiscovery is obviously an increasingly expensive process. Tools like the ones discussed here can help control spiraling costs, but you need to have a multi-pronged approach to how you deal with content before you ever get to an eDiscovery process. That way, whatever the reason for accessing it, you have complete control over your content. If you don't invest up front, chances are, you'll pay the price later. - Ron