E-discovery Vendors Need to Focus on Execution

Understanding how vendors’ approach the selling and implementation of e-discovery technology is a good barometer on how the market has matured and where the problems lie for the customer.

Before 2003, most e-discovery sales were service related and outsourcing was the norm. The focus was on the right side of the EDRM model (processing, review and production). How ESI was collected and preserved was not attracting a lot of attention back then. Most collections were either forensic acquisitions or manual “drag and drop” into a folder across a corporate network.

Beginning in 2004, we started to see new technology entering the market that could do defensible enterprise, wide automated collections and processing. This trend was driven by the need to properly preserve metadata and risks of spoliation during preservation. Most sanctions delivered over the last six years have been about the failure to properly preserve the evidence.

Because e-discovery and the technology driving it was in its infancy, vendors were using a consultative approach to selling. That was because most attorneys and IT departments at that time did not understand e-discovery and how to properly conduct it. They relied on the vendor to show them the way.

The sales executive would make a first call to a potential customer with his sales engineer and so-called “e-discovery specialist” on hand to explain the technology to legal and IT, articulate the emerging e-discovery laws, the risk of noncompliance and why the technology was necessary to a defensible production. The terms “systematic, repeatable and defensible” originated from vendors and the herd of sales executives sent out to spread the message.

Until 2008, the majority of e-discovery sales continued to be outsourced. However, that year, we started to see a definite shift from a majority of companies outsourcing e-discovery to instead purchasing the technology for all phases of the EDRM life cycle. The drivers for this paradigm shift was the rising costs of outsourcing, ease of use of the new technology and companies realizing that could do it themselves just as well as a vendor. E-discovery was finally going in-house!

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Source: Inside Counsel
By: Albert Barsocchini