eDiscovery matters come in all shapes and sizes and regularly change from their initially estimated scope. There are many ways to judge the size of a matter: the number of custodians, the number of devices, the number of documents, and gigabyte size. These include information that comes from your clients and from what has been produced to you.
Legacy eDiscovery tools had difficulty handling large projects and were too expensive for the small ones. Fortunately, great strides have been made in modern eDiscovery software, accommodating projects of all sizes and any number of custodians. The primary key is the presentation and organization of data within the platform. The secondary key is accessibility to advanced tools to reduce the set of documents requiring human review and decision making. These can include de-dupe, near dupe, email threading, clustering, and even traditional search terms and date filtering.
So, what should you look for in a platform? You need workflows designed to facilitate your success and intuitive data loading to increase your efficiency. This is true whether you start one matter a month or a dozen. If you have many small matters, it’s important and advantageous to look for a system that can handle them with no additional cost. If your matters tend to grow in size, you need a platform that easily handles the increase in data. Cost is a consideration here too as monthly gigabyte fees can quickly balloon. Subscription services should be expandable without the need for additional IT infrastructure.
If you regularly have medium and large matters, being able to review while data is loading is a huge benefit. For example, loading a PST, finding data while it’s being loaded, and preparing for a deposition is far more efficient than waiting for load files to finish. Automated quality control and exception handling features have greatly improved the speed at which any data load can complete. Production workflow has been modernized in many tools so that large document productions don’t have to wait on everything to be imaged since it happens along the way in review. In legacy tools, you imaged everything and that would increase the storage space even for things you didn’t end up producing.
Many eDiscovery platforms have bridged the gap that traditionally separated which tools were appropriate for small, medium, or large cases. Projects can be moved from small to large and back again, allowing an organization to standardize on one set of workflows and one tool for cases of all sizes. In reality, the only change between the size of projects is how it lends itself to the total amount of storage needed in the platform – which is only an issue if the pricing structure is tied to gigabyte size.