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Taking Responsibility for the e-Discovery Process

By Sophia Lee and Christine Soares
September 28, 2011

Your company has just been sued in federal court. In this age of electronic discovery, you know you will apportion a large majority of your litigation costs to discovery, with the bulk of the expense for e-discovery. You also know the process of gathering, recovering, reviewing and producing electronically stored information (“ESI”) can be expensive, time-consuming and tedious. Your company may not have all of the resources in place to handle the task, and the job may even be too big for your outside counsel to handle in its entirety. It is no wonder, then, that when discussing pre-trial strategy with your litigation team, outsourcing the e-discovery process is a topic on the table.

Outsourcing, however, is not without risk. Often, IT consultants do not understand the law, the review team is not intimately involved in the case, and counsel lacks basic knowledge of information systems, affecting their ability to manage the process. Combine all three risks into one case, and you have the makings of a perfect sanctions or legal malpractice storm.

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