eDiscovery: What’s Your Top Priority?

Part 6 of equivant’s Best Practices Series

With the influx of big data and the incredible amount of information that can be involved in a single case, eDiscovery has taken on a life of its own. Platforms promise every sort of bell and whistle and shiny, complicated, hard-to-understand technology, and it’s easy to lose focus on what’s really important: Your team.

Best Practice: Focus on the mechanics of what your team can DO with your tool and how efficiently they can work.

Don’t get us wrong—we love shiny technology—but when a tool can pull together a thousand disparate documents but can’t easily package them for transfer, you have a problem. That’s why it’s essential to keep your team top-of-mind and find a tool that meets both your discovery needs and your team’s needs.

  1. Start with your processes. How are materials gathered? How are they currently being packaged? How are they being sent and tracked? What are your team’s pain points with the status quo? It may sound basic, but make sure your eDiscovery technology can do everything paper can do. It’s easy to add or remove a document from a stack of paper – can you just-as-easily do the same when you’re creating an electronic package?
  2. Ensure you’re meeting your obligations. Your team is working within prescribed, inflexible timeframes, and they need to be able to move quickly. Look for a system that can pull all documents into a single PDF, can Bates Stamp without requiring your team to open the PDF in a separate program, auto-generates an index so your team isn’t making one manually, and can easily create a ZIP file containing all assets in all formats. Whatever your team needs to do, make sure they can do it all within your eDiscovery tool and aren’t shuffling between multiple programs or doing things manually.
  3. Keep your documentation in order. The more documentation that happens automatically and securely, the better. Can you tell when documents were sent? Can you verify the secure transfer? Do you know when the receiver downloaded the package? Look for tools that take some of the rote tasks off your team’s plates and securely document everything you may need in the future.
  4. Integrate as much as you can. When your team is bouncing between multiple tools and platforms all day, the potential for error increases dramatically. Ensure consistent case information by integrating with your case management tool, and look for other critical processes in your office, such as epayments or file storage, that could also be managed within a single tool.

When you’re ready for a tool that puts your team first (and is also pretty shiny), let’s talk about JWorks . We’re a team of justice practitioners who love user-friendly technology, and we can’t wait to show you what JWorks can do for your team. Give us a call today.