The discovery team of a leading global pharmaceutical company faced an unanticipated spike in government investigations and sharp rise in discovery requests that was difficult to meet with current bandwidth. The legal department sought to retain a third-party to help manage the workload, and reassess the overall discovery governing model to ensure that cost-effective resources and defensible processes were in place to meet the organization’s increasing discovery demands.

Our team was engaged to provide discovery and project management resources to the law department. We served as cross functional experts to manage ongoing discovery business process improvement efforts, and cost saving initiatives. Based on the initial success, we were engaged to create a center of excellence to replicate the established program across business entities.

Our team also provided case-level support for the execution of discovery obligations. Involved in large, complex cases and small, routine matters from the meet and confer through trial, our team’s focus included:

• Upfront planning for downstream discovery needs
• Scoping and addressing litigation hold requirements
• Data source identification and collection
• Processing decisions and error reporting
• Review setup and workflow management
• Production quality control
• Case closing data remediation

Over the course of the engagement, our team worked alongside in-house and external counsel resources while managing hundreds of cases spanning millions of documents. In conjunction with the client team, we reduced risk and generated millions of dollars in cost savings annually through the creation of an international discovery center of excellence.

Note: This work was performed prior to joining Stout.