As more legal departments—and even some law firms—strive to run their operations as a business, the selection of enterprise e-discovery software and services has become an increasingly important decision for litigation operations. While the challenges of reducing costs and finding new efficiencies haven't changed, they are joined by other compelling factors that have come into sharper focus for project managers, including managing the quantity and type of data, determining risk, ensuring quality and reliability, and choosing technological support.

Depending on whom you talk to (vendor, lawyer, project manager) and from what your own experience has taught, outsourcing the e-discovery process may or may not be the right decision. While outsourcing is frequently used for law firms and legal departments, more are equipped to handle it in house, according to Brad Blickstein, founder of the Blickstein Group.

“Historically, most of the work that has been outsourced by the law department, including work done by law firms, can be done less expensively in house if there is enough of it and a way to get the work done. As law departments have become more sophisticated about e-discovery and document review, and they realize that they can license the same technology and build the same teams as service providers. These operations are under the same evaluation,” explains Blickstein, who notes that risk and cost are the “yin and yang of the legal function.”