Non-Litigation Support Deduping

By Joe Howie

2009 Electronic Records Management Survey, A Call for Sustainable Capabilities

This is the sixth survey that Cohasset Associates has conducted in conjunction with ARMA and it remains one of the best sources of information on how well companies are doing in preserving and managing their paper and electronic records. This year the survey reported a great improvement in the number of organizations that now include electronic records in their records holds — 87 percent. However, the overwhelming majority of respondents do not have retention practices in place for emerging sources of records such as voice-mail, instant messaging, blogs and Web pages — 78 percent.

Individuals who are involved in requesting records from other parties ought to study this report because it gives insight into potential problems or weaknesses in the records management practices of many organizations, e.g.

• retention schedules
• legal holds
• self evaluations of the perceived adequacy of various components of records management
• sources for guidance on records management
• number of backup tapes currently being retained
• impact of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

It includes a self-assessment test users can use within their own organization. If you only have time to read and study one survey, this is the one to focus on.

Source: www.cohasset.com/

Fulbright & Jaworksi 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report

This report summarizes F&J’s suvery of major corporations. It examines types of litigation and investigations for the past year and expectations in those areas for the upcoming year. For the third year in a row, there is an increase in respondents expecting more disputes over the next 12 months. More than a third of the respondents have increased their use of alternate fee arrangements.

Forty percent of the respondents had facilities in six or more countries and over half had operations in at least two countries, emphasizing the need for litigation support professionals to be able to manage collections with multiple languages and to be familiar with the privacy laws governing discovery in non-U.S. countries.

One bit of good news was that 88 percent of companies were satisfied with outside counsel in the area of electronic discovery — although that suggests about one-eighth of corporations aren’t satisfied.

The survey also explores preferences between arbitration and litigation with U.S. companies tending to prefer litigation and UK companies tending to prefer arbitration. More U.S. companies use alternative fee arrangements (48 percent) than UK companies (39 percent). To the extent that alternative fee arrangements give law firms an economic incentive to be efficient, this should provide more of a push to use more sophisticated electronic discovery processing tools and systems.

More companies with over $1 billion in revenue expect an increase in internal investigations (25 percent) than expect a decrease (5 percent).

There were survey questions directed specifically at patent, labor and employment, and class actions.

In the area of controlling the costs of electronic discovery, about a quarter of the companies use law firms with specialized e-Discovery practices, slightly under a quarter have preferred provider or master service agreements, and almost a half are doing some “in-sourcing” in the form of preservation and collection and/or document review. This suggests increasing opportunities for litigation support professionals in the corporate setting and also puts pressure on law firms to control the costs of e-Discovery or risk losing the business to in-house options.

Source: www.fulbright.com/images/publications/6thLitTrendsReport2009.pdf

Am Law Tech Survey 2009

American Lawyer surveyed 110 of the Am Law 200 firms on a number of topics including which electronic evidence data discovery vendors the firms used. Kroll Ontrack had the largest number (52 percent) followed closely by IPRO (51 percent). However, Kroll’s percentage had been 62 percent last year, while IPRO’s share had been 45 percent, suggesting a downward trend for Kroll but an upward trend for IPRO. CaseCentral’s percentage went from 16 percent to 25 percent, boosting its numbers by over one-half. On the flip side, Autonomy Zantaz went from a reported 27 percent in 2008 to 17 percent in 2009.

One interesting tidbit was that the number of respondents indicating that they were developing in-house applications went from eight to 12 percent. This could be the result of several factors such as unhappiness with the functionality/price mix of commercially-available systems coupled with the availability of software development kits that provide functionality like searching, concept clustering and e-mail threading.

Other survey results included per-lawyer budgets for IT, operating expense and capital expenditures; use of videoconferencing ; staffing; virtualization (98 percent!!); extranets; VOIP; and wireless technology.

The cover article notes that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is being used for e-Discovery and some ancillary functions like human resources but not generally for the core function of document management.

Source: www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435151070&rss=newswire&hbxlogin=1

8th Annual ACC Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey

Serengeti Law is a legal e-billing and matter management platform which, according to its Web site, is used by thousands of in-house counsel and more than 20,000 law firms. They conducted a survey in conjunction with the Association of Corporate Counsel entitled the “2009 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey.” The full report is available from Serengeti for $500 for ACC members, $650 for members of Legal Marketing Association or $750 for non-ACC members.

I was able to obtain the 29-page executive summary and it highlights the increasing attention that in-house counsel are giving to managing their relationships with outside counsel using such techniques as “convergence” (fewer firms doing more of the company’s work), getting bids, systematically evaluating the performance of outside counsel and in fact terminating relationships with underperforming firms. The summary also noted the use of alternative fee arrangements. The ACC Serengeti survey provides further emphasis to the importance of law firms being aggressive in managing and hopefully lowering the costs of litigation support in general and e-Discovery in particular.

One other interesting fact: in-house counsel find it inconvenient to have to go to a number of extranets maintained by their different law firms.

Source: www.serengetilaw.com/Survey/default.htm

Applied Discovery 2009 Survey on E-Discovery Project Management

Applied Discovery has a report on its survey of 73 law firm attorneys and corporate decision makers on how e-Discovery is conducted in terms of who gathers and processes electronic records. The survey indicated that while over half of the respondents perceived project management as being critical to success, 30 percent rated their own organization’s e-Discovery management as only fair or poor. Other topics included the importance of reviewer training, and the use of off-shore review services and the deployment of corporate tools for identification, analysis and culling.

Source: www.applieddiscovery.com/ws_display.asp?filter=Home

Report on Kershaw-Howie Survey of E-Discovery Providers Pertaining to Deduping Strategies

This report summarizes the survey by Anne Kershaw and me of leading e-Discovery providers on the topic of deduping. Report highlights: deduping within records of individual custodians resulted in data reduction of 21.4 percent while deduping across custodians reduced volume by 38.1 percent. Despite the obvious efficiencies of deduping across custodians, it was done in only half the cases. Available on the Web site of the eDiscovery Institute:

Source: www.eDiscoveryInstitute.org

This article appeared originally in the November 2009 ALSP Update, the monthly publication of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals and is reprinted with permission. Read more about this nonprofit membership organization at www.alsponline.org.