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Why Organizations are Bringing eDiscovery In house
According to the 451 Group's eDiscovery and eDisclosure 2010 User Survey entitled "Bringing it All Back Home," corporate e-discovery in-sourcing will continue to grow as customers adopt software and services over reliance on law firms or wholly outsourcing the process. There is a good reason that businesses are adopting this DIY approach to e-Discovery. It is anchored in the attitude of law firms to using technology to enhance the litigation process, which has been prevalent among lawyers in private firms since the late 1980s when computerised litigation support (CLS), as it was then called, emerged as a business. Private law firms have always applied a cock-eyed logic to CLS and its successors.
While most businesses operate under the notion that increased efficiencies bring increased profits, the litigation departments of most law firms turn this logic on its head, i.e. the more inefficient they are the more they can bill and, therefore the more money they will make. I can still vividly remember the day that a senior partner in a magic circle law firm in the City rather unceremoniously threw me out of his office with the comment: "So you are telling me that you will substantially reduce the £10,000 per week that I currently make from manual document searches. Get outta here!" (Or something to that effect.)
Similarly, in 1987 when I wrote an article for the Law Society Gazette on the topic of employing technology to assist in managing litigation, saying "IT is there -use it," I rather foolishly (and naively) thought that law firms might eventually wake up to looking at ways that they could become more competitive. Instead, 23 years later, it is their clients who are taking the initiative. And it is their clients who are writing the articles for the Gazette, asking the pertinent question - "Why can't law firms behave more like businesses?" As Barry Matthews at ITV has commented: ‘You can demand greater efficiency. This has all come from making firms think about how they staff their jobs - think about it in advance rather than throw bodies at a job, then look at the timesheet and say "what do you think we can get away with?" (Please see In-house interview: how ITV is rewriting its role with external firms, 14 October 2009, p. 3.)
So, now that eDiscovery software vendors are providing in-house counsel with the tools that they need to be more self-sufficient, enabling them to introduce the efficiencies in the litigation process that private law firms have failed to provide, it is not surprising that corporations are waking up to the enormous savings that they can make in "Bringing it all back Home."