When case studies are written detailing how the legal industry moved from reviewing paper documents to collecting, reviewing and producing volumes of hard drives the story will undoubtedly include the role of litigation support. Facing complex projects involving electronic discovery, legal teams did what was necessary to solve immediate problems, they hired support professionals. Out of necessity (legal matters generally do not have room for error), attorneys threw money at the new challenges and created a new category of employee, litigation support. They created entire departments focused on electronic discovery. And the results have been favorable. It is generally accepted that there are no ‘silver bullets’ in eDiscovery and that talented support professionals are necessary to manage the complexity.
From a cost perspective, however the employment of an entire new category of employee may be viewed as an inefficient but necessary step on the technology adoption curve. I believe the case studies will be written much differently. Legal matters involve a lot of moving parts with constantly changing requirements. They have input from experts requiring an evaluation and re-evaluation of the case throughout the process. With legal cases, there is a need for high accountability and there is seldom if ever a straight line from start to finish. As a result, attorneys have long developed methods for managing cases with ‘people, processes and technology.' The legal industry knew about "agile" practices before the project management term was created. And, eDiscovery proved to be no different. Legal teams tackled the challenges associated with eDiscovery in a familiar way, they used a multi-discipline team approach.
Today, predictive coding software offers exciting opportunities to improve information governance (IG). Much like the promise of technology for eDiscovery, the opportunity to use data analytics in information management is compelling. Software used by attorneys to code and classify documents offers promise to improve document lifecycle management by automatically classifying and profiling large data sets, providing deeper insight and convenient access to reliable data. However, we also know, software alone will not achieve optimal results.
In summary, leveraging "people, process and technology", IG professionals can improve compliance with a carrot, not a stick. The opportunity is to empower those closest to the work to document, measure and report key metrics, descriptions and activities within an information governance program. By connecting business intelligence to compliance in an incremental process improvement framework, we improve compliance while providing deeper insight into data repositories.
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