Leveraging Dashboards to Streamline Litigation Management and Reduce Information Management Costs

Written by Richard Hall  | 12 January 2011

The explosive growth of information has transformed the landscape of technologies supporting litigation and e-discovery. Litigation management is looking beyond document collection, processing and review tools to solutions that help manage the litigation process. Successful legal departments are embracing dashboard technology to help streamline the e-discovery process and reduce their overall litigation and information management costs. A highly effective dashboard provides the information General Counsels need to make timely and intelligent management decisions.

Litigation Management Challenges
The in-house legal department in most organizations is the most underfunded department in the company. Yet, when major litigation occurs, they are called upon to perform their magic at whatever cost required. Their challenge - a lack of investment in tools to effectively manage the entire e-discovery process. Many legal departments are still managing the multi-million dollar process with spreadsheets and email.

Surprisingly, the “bet the farm” matters are not the ones that keep General Counsel awake at night. Sleep deprivation is caused by the lack of insight into the garden variety matters that may suddenly expand in scope and cost. It is not the $20 million matter that causes angst because the company expects to spend a lot of money. It is the $100 thousand matter that turned into a $2 million matter that causes heartburn.

How can this happen? The entire spectrum of e-discovery is built upon siloed processes that do not effectively talk to each other. A typical process looks something like the following:

• The legal department issues a preservation notice and then relies upon individuals and IT to effectively preserve the data.
• IT is then asked to collect the data and send it out to service providers for processing.
• The service providers then send the data to law firms for document review.
• Once reviewed, the law firms send the data to a service provider for production to opposing parties.

As you can tell, the dynamics of a matter may change, yet the tools are not in place to “raise the flag” and re-evaluate the matter until after the fact. Since each step in the process has its own cost that is impacted by volume of data, scope creep in any of these areas can have a major impact on the management and cost of a matter.

Leveraging dashboards to streamline litigation management
Today, more than ever, it is imperative that in-house counsel have visibility into the litigation process to quickly access and understand the status of any project at any time. They need to be able to view the status of each step in the process for each matter as well as compare the current matter to historical matters of similar type. The solution is a litigation management dashboard.

The technical challenges of putting together such a dashboard are not to be minimized, as the source locations may be comprised of SQL databases, proprietary systems, remote third party tools and manual processes. To be effective, the system should be flexible enough to accept feeds from other systems in the form of direct integrations or simply flat files. Software integrations via application programming interface (API) are preferred whereas custom development is not. Why? Because e-discovery software vendors provide new releases at a rapid rate. Custom development for the dashboard would require constant updates with so many products involved.

The key to the effectiveness of data presented on the dashboard is relevancy. What are the data elements that an attorney or General Counsel require to make timely and informed decisions? Typical data points are the number of custodians, disposition of preservation notices and responses, amount of data collected, schedule for review, how many documents are to be reviewed, etc. The critical error is trying to present too much data. It is quite easy to transform a dynamic and effective dashboard into a poor reporting tool. Leave the process details to the process owners; just present the facts.

In addition, the dashboard should have its own database repository for historical reporting. Many of the e-discovery systems are transaction oriented and the matter may have a short life span (i.e. matters are settled early). Capturing the relevant metrics and retaining them long term provides considerable benefit for comparative analysis in the future.

Reduce Litigation and Information Management Costs
The days of outsourcing all aspects of electronic discovery are rapidly coming to an end. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, along with recent judicial opinions, mandate that corporations must preserve documents in anticipation of litigation. Because the rules are not yet fully defined, corporations have to use their best judgment on how to manage e-discovery while balancing the risk of sanctions against the cost of expensive discovery. Unfortunately, most corporations are unable to quantify the cost of e-discovery. The hard costs are identifiable through vendor and law firm invoices. The soft costs are much more difficult to determine. For example, how many hours and salary dollars are spent on e-discovery versus daily job related tasks? How much storage is used to preserve data?

Understanding how much you are spending on e-discovery can help support business decisions to reduce costs, but the data is not generally available fast enough to help make strategic decisions about a particular matter. For example, the invoices received from outside counsel or service providers typically arrive 30 – 90 days out. How do you know if you have exceeded your budget for the matter or if it makes more sense to settle because the dynamics have changed?

Litigation management dashboards should also be leveraged to estimate and forecast costs. Leveraging a unit cost approach, metrics within the dashboard can help derive a cost per process. These metrics can then be compared to invoices received later to refine the unit costs. Over time, the dashboard can estimate existing costs fairly accurately. Using historical data and simple forecasting techniques, one can forecast how much work is remaining and what the total cost of the matter will be.

For corporations that use matter management or electronic invoicing systems, the dashboard can be integrated with them to provide a holistic view of the legal enterprise. For many corporations, e-discovery is the most costly aspect of litigation. For others, e-discovery is a small expense compared to the legal research involved. Integrating the dashboard with other legal systems provides an invaluable tool that corporate General Counsels need to make intelligent management decisions and give their corporation a competitive advantage.