As head of discovery consulting at electronic discovery vendor Consilio LLC, Christopher Adams watched firsthand as the demand for third-party discovery services grew into a $6.2 billion market, according to Thomson Reuters.

Now Adams will help McDermott Will & Emery compete with those companies as the Am Law 100 firm fights to keep its share of a shrinking e-discovery pie for law firms. Adams joined the firm's discovery division, McDermott Discovery, in late October as chief strategic counsel.

Adams said he will be focused on “more closely aligning” McDermott's discovery and technology capabilities to make litigation across the firm “more efficient and effective.”

He noted that he has long been “intrigued” by the idea of implementing discovery technology and processes for a law firm but had not found the right fit until McDermott. The firm was among the first to launch an electronic discovery model using staff lawyers when it opened its “Discovery Center” in 2010 and expanded it in 2013.

“I'd been looking at law firms and asking, 'Why aren't they doing this more? Why aren't they using this as a way to drive business?'” Adams said. “And McDermott is one that is doing that. And I think that's a huge differentiator in the law firm space.”

Law firms are often clients of e-discovery vendors as they cede a lower-margin business to lower-priced competitors. In a Thomson Reuters survey, 34 percent of firms said they currently use a vendor to provide e-discovery services (13 percent of in-house departments do so).

“Much of the use of [e-discovery vendors] by law firms for these tasks is being driven by client expectations that [vendors] be used for these types of tasks in order to control costs more effectively,” states the Thomson Reuters report.

But a handful of firms market their own expertise in e-discovery, including Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, which for nearly a decade has offered a service branded Nelson Mullins Encompass.

McDermott is not in the business of doing e-discovery for other law firms, Adams said. The firm, which recently expanded its expertise in the financial technologies space, instead wants to be able to provide its own clients with a more cost-effective and efficient discovery model.

Adams said McDermott's relative head start on other firms still shows up in how the discovery center approaches technology including Relativity, which the firm uses with “customized scripts” and having a full-time developer on staff.

“It reminded me of the best parts of third-party vendors,” said Adams, who will work out of his new firm's office in Washington, D.C.

He is hoping to offer something more than that to McDermott. Adams said a law firm has a chance to find more “efficiencies” in litigation than e-discovery providers because the firm has control over a broader swath of the project and they are involved from an early stage.

Adams said he expects that law firms will increasingly challenge e-discovery vendors for work in the future, noting that third parties are pushing firms to become better businesspeople.

“This has forced law firms to take a harder look at how they drive value for clients. These companies are all about the value proposition for clients. And that's how they sell their services,” Adams said. “And law firms now need to come to the table with that same value proposition that clients are expecting them to be ready to discuss.”