InsideCounsel Roundtable - May 2010 - 13

Roundtable
alternative to traditional law firm review and have added that expectation on case management and developing the appropriate case plan to our outside counsel guidelines. Some outside counsel may be uncomfortable with that expectation initially, but in our experience, law firms outsource document review in large cases anyway. Rather than just outsourcing review via the law firm, without a quality process in place to evaluate and manage it, we decided we wanted to control it and get better rates on the basis of our volume. It’s part of a partnership, and you’re always balancing the scale. We don’t want to tip the relationship scale so much that people don’t want to work for us or compromise our ability to get the results. Chakraborty, Oracle: Will using automated review, along with a few people who are very wellversed in the case, become more acceptable to the courts? Oot, e-Discovery Institute: The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure presents litigants with a reasonable inquiry standard yet some lawyers inaccurately understand that human review is a best practice. Studies show that knowledgeable attorneys using technology can make a more compelling reasonableness story than using rooms full of reviewers. I feel education and additional case law discussing this problem will help attorneys act more reasonably when responding to discovery requests. Troisi, Samsung: In some cases, you can have 10 people searching and only one of them finds the document—the other nine miss it. Troisi, Samsung: I’m a big believer in process. You have to have the right processes in place technology ought to be able to get us out.” I tend to think of it more like beer, where when beer gets someone into a mess, very rarely will more beer get them out. I think the solution here will be a hybrid between what technology can do to leverage the expertise locked into all of our lawyers heads, while eliminating the grunt work of having to look at a million documents. Knaapen, Chevron: You also need a champion. You can define the champion in different ways, but the champion is someone who says, “This is important to us, and it’s costing the company a lot of money.” You also Chakraborty, Oracle: Then, you need to find somebody in the IT department who can grab data and hand it over to your internal team. Once you have freed up the IT department from production black holes, they’ll be more than happy to continue to help you. Michels, Cisco: Before you start making a heavy investment in any kind of infrastructure, you should focus on having someone oversee e-discovery costs. Then, low-hanging fruit becomes more obvious and you can make a lot of different investment decisions after that. Brudz, GE: When you buy technology or hire people, make sure they pay for themselves on the case that you’re working on right then and there. That way, you don’t have to go through a big capital expenditure. And then you’ve got it for the rest of your life, and it’s gravy. Brudz, GE: My friend and all around e-discovery guru Browning Marean at DLA often says, “Technology got us into this mess, Zeller, Guidance Software: What are some specific ideas that smaller legal departments with limited resources would find useful? That’s the problem. You need standardization. There has to be an automated way to review and destroy some of it. and you have to know how to use the tools you have. But in the end, because we have this data, we’re not going to get rid of it. Even if we were to stop today collecting data, we have enough data for all of the lawyers in the world to spend the rest of their lives reviewing.

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InsideCounsel Roundtable - May 2010

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