We help organizations create legal hold programs that balance defensible best practices against their unique preservation needs. Our approach is based on first defining a practical and repeatable process, then incorporating the appropriate technologies to establish defensibility, create efficiencies, and foster collaboration.

Not only do we have unparalleled experience selecting and implementing legal hold technologies, we can also manage systems on behalf of our clients acting as ongoing support resources.

Technology Experience:

• Exterro Legal Hold
• Zapproved Legal Hold Pro
• IBM Atlas and StoredIQ for Legal
• Onit Legal Hold
• Relativity Legal Hold
• Total Discovery
• EnCase eDiscovery
• Home-grown systems

We advise legal and IT teams on how to defensibly collect and process data to support their discovery, regulatory, and investigation needs. Knowing that each organization has unique needs, we develop approaches that factor in the organization’s size, geographical presence, resource allocation, legal portfolio volume and composition, risk-tolerance, technology offerings, and data source requirements.

These efforts position our clients to minimize risk, improve turnaround times and client satisfaction, and lower costs by instilling:

• Optimal internal/external resource support models
• Processes to automate routine collection tasks
• Clearly defined role and responsibilities with agreed upon standard service level agreements (SLAs)
• Efficient request workflows that are easy-to-use and provide meaningful status updates
• Standardized processing specifications that align with industry best practices and corporate postures
• Practical and proportional data culling and analytic strategies
• Error handling reports and remediation processes
• Centralized reporting and metrics, which enhance day-to-day case management and data reuse

We play a critical role establishing consistent and repeatable document review workflows, first-level review guidelines, privilege log controls, and quality assurance protocols. Our focus on communication and reporting structures required to successfully manage document review projects is one of Stout’s differentiators.

Our advisory-focused approach has afforded us significant opportunity to build robust document review programs utilizing different platforms hosted at leading discovery service providers and AM Law 100 firms. We apply the same methodology to cloud-hosted solutions for managing internal investigations, employment matters, or other sensitive cases. Particularly, we have experience with document review projects across the financial services, energy, and pharmaceutical industries, including HSR second requests.

We assist clients in maximizing the value of machine learning and analytics in the context of discovery. This includes building custom workflows and training programs to increase the usage of analytics during document review. When we serve as discovery case managers, we often provide case teams with guidance on when to consider and leverage analytics.

Examples of analytics use cases include:

• Keyword expansion to refine keyword lists and identify additional documents for review
• Email threading to increase review consistency and review speed while reducing review population
• Language identification to structure like data for optimal review planning
• Machine learning for data reuse and production consistency
• Concept clustering and searching to group like data for review efficiency and cost reduction
• Predictive coding and continuous active learning to increase accuracy and review efficiency

We assist corporate legal departments and the enterprise enhance legal service requests and contracting processes. By defining standard templates, approved clause language, self-service agreements, approval processes, security restrictions, and roles, we create workflows to address the end-to-end contract lifecycle management process. In addition to providing organizations with increased scalability, such workflows and global contract repositories are also very useful in centralizing contracts for more effective renewal management and understanding contract obligations.

Technology Experience:

• Icertis
• Conga/Apttus
• Coupa
• DocuSign Spring CM
• Onit CLM
• Malbek

We work with clients to enhance collaboration across departments and external parties by implementing centralized document management systems. In addition to helping organize, locate, and manage documents, we help clients integrate with Microsoft Outlook/O365, Adobe, Foxit and other commonly used applications for seamless document storage and retrieval.

Our services help clients understand different sources of content, develop standard folder structures, categorizations, and naming conventions, and also migrate legacy data into a centralized document repository. We recommend best practices from system design through change management, training, and rollout to end users. We collaborate closely with clients and the software vendor to ensure a positive user experience that yields optimal long-term system adoption.

Technology Experience:

• iManage
• NetDocs
• SharePoint
• OpenText^™

We help clients automate their matter management process and adopt e-billing and spend management technology to increase transparency and improve productivity working with outside counsel and vendors. Our implementations provide clients with robust reporting capabilities and allow a better understanding of current spend and resource allocation to use internal and external resources cost effectively.

We partner closely with clients to understand and elicit key requirements and develop matter categorization approaches and workflows that maximize system efficiencies to meet their needs. Our client support extends through iterative system testing and best practices for training and transition into production. Post implementation, we provide measurable success criteria for ongoing adoption and continual improvement.

Technology Experience:

• Brightflag
• doeLEGAL ASCENT^™
• Lexis Nexis^® CounselLink^®
• Mitratech TeamConnect
• Onit Enterprise Legal Management
• Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker
• Wolters Kluwer Passport^®
• Wolters Kluwer TyMetrix ^®360 (T360)

We evaluate legal spend with an eye towards cost reduction and cost avoidance. Often, the cost-cutting initiatives we are involved in occur at the company level, and other times it may follow a costly litigation or investigation. In either scenario, our methods include both low-tech and more sophisticated methods depending on the client’s needs. On the low-tech end, we leverage historical law firm and vendor invoice data. On the more sophisticated end, we focus on optimizing reporting and dashboards in existing matter and spend management technologies or evaluating newer market entrants focused on law firm and attorney benchmarking.

The output of these types of evaluations may focus on the following:

• Identifying core panel of law firms and vendors
• Comparing most utilized providers in terms of practice areas, usage, and rates
• Evaluating use or opportunity for alternative legal service providers (ALSPs)
• Establishing a regular workflow and cadence for rate negotiations
• Analyzing service provider selection and evaluation approach (law firms, ALSPs, and discovery vendors)
• Evaluating fee arrangements including fixed or alternative fee arrangements or potential use of such
• Providing recommendations on processes for provider program, consolidation, rate negotiation, fee structures, selection/RFP, and scorecard approach
• Providing recommendations on reporting and related technology to optimize visual display of metrics coming from company systems. This includes high-level review of business intelligence, dashboards, and outside legal spend benchmarking tools to complement reporting from matter and spend management tools
• Developing a future state roadmap outlining activities and high-level costs to implement recommendations

Our team has developed an innovative approach to automate your organization’s legal business processes. Leveraging various workflow platforms, our team of process improvement experts can design tailored workflows to automate legal operations that significantly impact your risk, cost, and value.

We implement workflow automation solutions that are highly flexible and can scale to automate single-independent processes or the deployment of a comprehensive model across many stakeholders and departments. We also provide services to evaluate how your organization can benefit from process automation, the impact that process automation can have, and internal and external stakeholder readiness to adopt new automated workflows.

Example workflow automations include:

• Service of process
• Legal service requests
• Discovery workflow tracking
• Data catalog and mapping refresh
• Training and certification attestation
• Third-party risk management
• Law firm evaluation and scorecards