Organizations are rethinking their approach on managing legal spending for electronic data discovery and document review. Initially, a litigation support and e-discovery department was mainly present within large law firms with “matter-specific” vendor outsourcing. As the industry gained momentum via technological advancements, the onus of having a robust EDD practice shifted to vendors, whose operating model was based on commodity work efforts servicing multitudes of clients.

Law firms readjusted their focus to providing legal services and advising corporate clients to engage discovery service providers for data collection, processing, hosting and review to reduce firm risks. This approach helped firms and clients access the newest advances in EDD analytics, review and forensic technologies. However, the costs of electronically stored information collection, processing and hosting—which were previously comingled with attorney fees, and at times written off—are now visible to the client. These discovery costs are validating the insourcing decisions of EDD technologies and personnel.

Companies tend to rely upon service providers—or IT infrastructure, security and/or network engineers—to identify and harvest requested information. Many technical support departments are not well versed in the basic tenets of litigation phases, internal investigations or defensible data collection techniques—the personnel simply execute an information-gathering inquiry or implement policies that have been designed by the legal department.