There's no question that litigation costs loom among the top concerns currently bogging down companies. In fact, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of a corporation's legal spend is earmarked for litigation and e-discovery costs. Most e-discovery budgets, however, aren't being spent as efficiently as they could be. An August 2017 study by Aberdeen revealed that while 80 percent of companies have invested in e-discovery tools, the vast majority of them are underutilizing these tools, often relying on them exclusively for identifying electronically stored information (ESI).

As judges grow increasingly impatient with outdated, disorganized and disjointed approaches to legal-hold management, 2018 is shaping up to be the year when a majority of organizations finally recognize that manual, spreadsheet-driven methods for managing the legal-hold process are too costly and inefficient to justify. Thanks to advances in legal-hold management technology, in-house legal teams can now use automation to act quickly on their obligations to identify, collect and preserve important electronically stored evidence. A quality legal-hold automation platform can put in-house lawyers in the driver's seat, decrease their reliance on outside counsel and IT departments to implement legal holds, and drive down litigation spend while increasing productivity.

Companies that automate legal holds and data collection stand to reap substantial cost-savings that can help trim bloated litigation budgets. Fortunately, it's not hard to do. Here are three approaches to defensible legal-hold automation that companies can adopt to achieve significant savings.

Deploy a Reputable Automated Legal-Hold Management Platform in 2018

Although in-house attorneys are not required to micromanage employees throughout the legal-hold process, they are required to keep detailed and regular records of the process to document their organization's efforts to preserve relevant evidence. Instead of having expensive outside counsel manually prepare questionnaires, conduct interviews and track responses, companies can use an automated legal-hold management platform to access industry-vetted questionnaire templates and customize those templates with drag-and-drop questionnaire builders. They can also use automated legal-hold delivery, acknowledgement and tracking features to generate easy-to-follow quality control reports, which they can subsequently produce in court to show they have taken reasonable steps to preserve relevant evidence.

Taking these steps can generate key cost savings in a number of ways. Outside counsel, for example, can generally bill as much as $400 per hour to conduct custodian interviews, which typically last from one to two hours. This means a company interviewing 50 custodians could be forced to spend as much as $40,000 in legal fees on interviews alone, a cost that can be avoided entirely by simply swapping out in-person interviews for e-mailed questionnaires. Most of these platforms are also sufficiently user-friendly to allow in-house attorneys to manage the entire process without having to ask IT to intervene. This helps bolster productivity, facilitate quicker response times and reduce spoliation risks. Currently only 29 percent of companies use legal-hold management platforms; those that don't should be taking a closer look.

Use Direct Connectors to Speed Up Collection and Preservation

Direct connectors—which only 27 percent of companies currently incorporate into their workflows—speed up data identification and collection while reducing reliance on outside counsel and IT support tickets. They do this by allowing automated legal hold and collection programs to sync via scripting directly with an organization's human resources and enterprise platform databases. This gives in-house attorneys direct access to data and workstations so they can conduct early case assessments, collect evidence, track changes in employee status and suspend routine deletion tasks that could compromise potentially relevant evidence—all without the assistance of IT.

Companies that use direct connectors can eliminate their reliance on multiple vendors and programs to collect data from diverse sources while minimizing the various formatting and collection challenges that arise when collecting data in other ways. Companies using direct connectors can also eliminate the need to pay for higher-cost enterprise platform user licenses in order to meet current defensible legal-hold standards. With an automated legal-hold platform in place to meet its compliance obligations, an organization can opt for a much less expensive user license for its enterprise platform, which can result in savings of five or six figures, depending on the platform.

Seek Out Cloud-Based, All-In-One Solutions

After your team collects and segregates potentially relevant data for litigation, you'll need to find an encrypted repository to store it for further analysis and review. Using a cloud-based legal-hold solution is the simplest, most effective approach to handling sensitive litigation data. Automated legal-hold platforms and APIs can effectively address security and access requirements by storing collected files in encrypted, cloud-hosted environments that allow for secure 24/7, multidevice access to authorized users. This eliminates the need to invest in high-maintenance, on-premises servers, which can cost companies over $50,000 per year per server, even with basic setups. This doesn't even include the additional costs of implementing top-tier physical and data security safeguards, which are included in many automated legal-hold platform packages.

Outsourcing data security compliance to legal-hold solutions providers allows companies not only to save money on hiring dedicated IT staff, but also to show that they have taken reasonable steps to protect electronically stored evidence by working with outside data security specialists. Many cloud-based legal-hold platforms also give legal teams the ability to process, store and sift through data before uploading it onto document review platforms, which limits or eliminates the need to hire multiple vendors to accomplish the same tasks.

Companies sticking to manual approaches to legal-hold management are missing a huge opportunity to make their procedures both more defensible and more cost-effective. Organizations of all sizes stand to benefit from taking a closer look at their legal-hold management, collection and preservation protocols as they struggle to adapt to judges' ever-changing expectations for defensible workflows. Given the ease, flexibility and defensibility that intelligent automation can bring to organizational workflows, cloud-based legal-hold platforms with direct connectors should be a major consideration for any company heading into 2018.

Alon Israely is co-founder of TotalDiscovery. TotalDiscovery is a highly secure, legally defensible web application that reduces enterprise risks and costs related to labor and employment, civil lawsuits, regulatory requests and internal investigations.