Most legal department e-discovery professionals know that e-discovery is more like a living workflow than a one-off tool. And like any workflow, it needs to evolve as a company's needs change.

But overhauling e-discovery is no easy task. Just ask two of the winners of the 2018 Corporate E-Discovery Hero Awards, who were tasked with revamping e-discovery processes at their individual companies. For them, the real change came not in implementing new technology, but in changing a department's operations to enable or work around technology.

An Overhaul in Education

Not too long ago, the legal department at commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE Group found itself drowning under the weight of its e-discovery work.

“We had some tools that we were using that weren't very advanced for e-discovery,” said Cortney VanDenburgh, CBRE's e-discovery manager. “And we started noticing that even on some of our smaller litigation matters, we were spending an insane amount of money and giving a lot of documents to our vendors and outside counsel.”

CBRE's general counsel decided to address these inefficiencies by bringing in a new e-discovery platform. But picking out a full end-to-end e-discovery tool was the easy part. The real challenge was training the staff and creating workflows to make sure the new platform seamlessly fit into CBRE's e-discovery operations.

So the GC tasked VanDenburgh, then a paralegal, with learning about the new platform and figuring out how best to introduce it into the office.

For VanDenburgh, who had no prior e-discovery experience but was passionate about taking on the challenge, this meant becoming a subject-matter expert in all things e-discovery. She soon achieved the Certified E-Discovery Specialist (CEDS) certification, and began looking to peers for advice.

What helped tremendously was “networking, networking, networking,” she said. “And looking at articles online at how people did it, looking at the different challenges they had.”

With e-discovery knowledge in tow, VanDenburgh worked closely with CBRE's “IT department to get a process down that made sense for our litigation and also was efficient, where the attorneys weren't looking at a ton of data they didn't need.”

VanDenburgh sectioned off e-discovery workflow responsibilities, tasking the IT department with the “back-end” workflows such as data collection, preservation, and managing custodians, and the legal, HR and compliance departments with the “front-end” responsibilities of data review and production.

She assigned specific people in the compliance, HR and legal departments to work on data review and met with them regularly to discuss the best ways to tackle each particular project, at times advocating for technologies such as analytics.

To educate in-house attorneys on the platform, VanDenburgh brought in CBRE's new e-discovery provider to train the staff and recorded the sessions for future use. She also had “several law firms come in and give seminars” periodically on e-discovery best practices.

What's more, VanDenburgh made herself available for attorneys and other staff to connect with should they run into any problems. “I'm the most knowledgeable about the product and the processes and people always know they can come to me. I've become very, very busy,” she said.

Throughout the whole process of streamlining CBRE's e-discovery, VanDenburgh noted that there was one element she absolutely could not do without. “I worked very closely with IT and other departments to have them implement the processes,” she said. “I have a great relationship with them, and that's so important, because if you're not working well with the different branches of people, the best process isn't going to work.”

A Tale of Two Legal Hold Platforms

In mid-2016, TransCanada Corp. acquired Columbia Pipeline Group, and like any merger, the combination of the two companies required more than just sharing office space.

One big “challenge going forward from the acquisition through 2017 was merging the two legal hold processes into one cohesive process for us,” said Dawn Radcliffe, legal technology manager at TransCanada.

The problem was that both companies used two different legal hold platforms that could not be integrated with one another. So “we had to export all of their legal holds” into TransCanada's system, Radcliffe recalled.

Radcliffe and her team also had to determine how the newly acquired company “managed preservation and collection, so that we would know what data was available and what data we needed to make sure was migrated,” she said.

What made such transition possible, all while ensuring that legal holds were still in place and could be managed effectively by the litigation department, was creating a data map of where Columbia Pipeline's legal holds were and making sure every process during the transition was meticulously documented.

“We had a very robust project plan and process in place for managing that whole transition,” Radcliffe said. “We knew at any given time where a particular legal hold was in the process and whether it was still waiting” to be exported or already verified and placed into TransCanada's system.

What's more, TransCanada “also implemented a cutoff date where no more legal holds were issued out of [the old] system,” she said.

Still, even with a well-defined process, the transition between two legal hold systems ran into its fair share of difficulties. One problem arose “at the template level because their legal holds were much simpler than ours,” Radcliffe said, noting that her team is still in the process of updating the documents.

Another challenge was “training the legal team that joined us on our robust legal hold process,” she added. “We pretty much had to start from scratch to train them and go through the ropes of what we consider triggering events and when we expect legal holds to be issued.”

There was also the need to make sure all legal holds had the most up-to-date information, a task that can take a considerable amount of time. Columbia Pipeline Group's custodians, for example, “came in with different email addresses that all had to be managed and converted and updated on all the legal hold [documents], so that was a bit of a challenge that took us three or four months to complete,” she said.

Despite such bumps in the road, in the end, the transition went off without any significant setbacks, a win Radcliffe attributes to making sure the team took the time to document every legal hold location, process and procedure. Such planning helped tremendously in understanding “where the data needed to go, how it needed to get there and what training needed to be provided to our new legal users as well as our custodians,” she said.