- April 26, 2022
- Gulfstream Legal
The EDRM currently consists of nine phases: information governance, identification, preservation, collection, processing, review, analysis, production and presentation. For each of these, there exists multiple software tools to help eDiscovery professionals successfully complete each phase. Some tools handle multiple phases, while others solve one particular challenge to eDiscovery, like foreign language documents. Developers are constantly adding features to improve their products, so they’re often changing. How do you know which eDiscovery tools are even out there, let alone which ones you should choose?
There are many considerations that go into selecting the right tools for an eDiscovery project. For instance, what phases in the EDRM do you need to be prepared to support? How much data is involved and where is it located? Is the data easy to access or require specialized tools or processes? What types of data need to be processed? Does it include special documents such as: accounting data, audio files, documents that need to be translated, group messaging chats, or data with emojis?
None of these considerations may be more important than the question of what phases in the EDRM you need to be prepared to support. Answering this question is critical to your organization as it will help to focus your eDiscovery tool search and your needs requirements. While some corporations may elect to handle every phase in-house up to the presentation phase, other organizations elect to handle only information governance and identification, leaving the other phases to outside counsel and consultant experts. These same focused decisions will need to be made by outside counsel and vendors alike before beginning their search for the right eDiscovery tool.
Once you have made this decision, your in-house team can then start to evaluate their skills and knowledge to decide if they are able to conduct the search and tool evaluation on their own, or if they need the help of an expert to find the right sized eDiscovery tool. Even with a well-balanced in-house team, they may still find themselves wandering the halls of a legal technology convention, where they will be bombarded by the bright lights, convention freebies, and sales staff of unrelated software.
When considering what tools to use, your decision should boil down to this: trust your eDiscovery vendor expert to guide you. We understand the nuances of your project and your data, and we have evaluated and used the tools we’re going to recommend you use. Our goal is to help you obtain the results you want in the most efficient way possible.
The topic of eDiscovery tools is so confusing that we’ve developed a monthly webinar series to help practitioners learn more about them and even see them in action. Sign up to receive our emails now and we’ll make sure you’re invited next time. We’re also developing a resource page to help you learn more.