Discovery
contact usDiscovery
contact usActing as an advocate and extension of the client team, we partner with legal departments, outside counsel, and vendors to develop, facilitate, and execute practical and consistent discovery processes.
Process and Program Improvement
We help clients build holistic discovery programs that are defensible, practical, repeatable, and cost-effective. By focusing on standardizing processes and roles and responsibilities across discovery phases, we ensure that your discovery process is well documented through templates and guides that are easy to follow and universally understood across parties. We also recognize the need for continuous improvement, and accordingly, provide suggested governance models and performance metrics to drive accountability and demonstrate ongoing success of the function.
Our solutions help shape discovery operations by guiding teams to:
- Assess existing discovery programs and provide recommendations to optimize any gaps
- Create and document end-to-end discovery processes, playbooks, guidelines, and templates
- Coordinate and manage the program regardless of law firms or providers in use
- Evaluate historical spend data to identify opportunities for creative fee arrangements, provider consolidation, and optimal sourcing of discovery activities
- Clearly define roles, responsibilities, and staffing models
- Provide benchmark data on staffing structures and role based compensation
- Evaluate and implement technologies covering legal hold, workflow tracking, collection, processing, review, production, and analytics
Data Mapping, Migration, and Remediation
Data Mapping
We assist organizations implement systems and processes to identify, track, and report on the location of enterprise business information, including the flow of data between systems and repositories. Our approach focuses on establishing an initial inventory (“data map” or “data catalogue”), as well as establishing an ongoing governance model to ensure data and key system personnel remain current and evergreen. Our efforts ensure that legal, IT, and information security are positioned to quickly respond to discovery or regulatory requests.
We also have extensive experience incorporating data mapping initiatives into an organization’s broader legal hold management process to ensure data preservation is aptly applied for new matters or investigations.
Data Migration
We have significant experience navigating and managing the complexities associated with migrating data between legal technology platforms. Our approach is based on developing tailored migration models that are practical, conservative, and balance an organization’s efficiency and reporting needs. We achieve this through early migration planning, robust scoping and analysis, field mapping and validation, data normalization, and disciplined project management.
We also provide comprehensive quality control support to validate the completeness, usability, and mapping of migrated data. Partnering with key internal stakeholders and software vendors, we create detailed validation plans that leverage test migration dry runs, objective quality assurance validations, and statistical and random sampling.
Our proven track record and defined methodology for seamless migrations provides confidence that your data will be properly mapped and made available in the new system.
Data Remediation
We help organizations establish and execute consistent data management processes and strong governance frameworks. We instill new proactive management protocols to reduce the data footprint, separate records for M&A activity, and cleanup long-standing repositories that have served as department “dumping grounds”. Our experience implementing programs to identify, organize, archive, and dispose of non-relevant information positions our clients to make well informed regulatory, tax, legal, and data retention decisions, while cost effectively scoping and responding to future discovery requests.
Case Management and Managed Services
When an effective case management approach can be replicated across the legal organization’s portfolio of matters, the efficiencies have a multiplier effect on defensibility and cost reduction. Our experienced resources help augment established client teams to quickly fill resource voids, help execute discovery on matters, manage projects, and continuously improve overall discovery operations.
We guide decisions from preservation to production to minimize risk and control cost by providing disciplined planning, proactive communication, experienced judgment, and consistent reporting to meet unique case needs.
Our resources and services help your discovery operation to:
- Handle increased or unexpected spikes in matter volume or tight deadlines
- Provide interim support when client resources are limited
- Manage portfolios of matters or individual high-stakes, large volume, or sensitive matters
- Document discovery workflows while managing case-specific discovery
- Train and onboard new client resources and provide oversight as resources get acclimated