A few years ago, the head of litigation at Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. issued a challenge to its legal department: cut the average cost of handling a matter by 30 percent.

So Kathryn Von Schoeler, the company's assistant vice president and counsel hit the ground running. “Being the company's e-discovery counsel, I, along with a group of paralegals, started to look internally at our EDRM operating model,” she told an audience at the “Innovative Use of Technology Inside Corporate Legal Departments” session at ILTACON18.

Von Schoeler found that during the collection phase of e-discovery, “there were a lot of handoffs, a lot of rework.” That initial e-discovery processes took so much time and effort that afterwards, the legal department was too burdened to continue handling e-discovery responsibilities on its own.

“We were all so tired and exhausted by the time we finally collected everything that we then shipped it all off to outside counsel, and they did all the deep and meaty e-discovery work. And I thought, there was our 30 percent savings,” she said.

To cut costs by bringing e-discovery work in-house, Von Schoeler had to first ease the burden of data collection. So she looked to enable the legal department by identifying relevant discoverable data for most cases, where it resided, and how to access it. “What we did first was to develop what we are now referring to as a knowledge repository,” Von Schoeler recalled.

Initially, her team identified seven routine allegation types that their legal department usually handles, such as life claim litigation. “We identified what were the 15 or 20 data sources or document types that we have to have for every one of our life claims matters,” Von Schoeler said. “And then we started to build out a deep description of what that data type is, and who has custody of that data.”

From there, her team also built an interactive case matter tracking form to link with the knowledge repository. “For every new matter, the paralegal will identify the allegation type that makes up the matter. Once you identify the type, there is a drop-down list that [shows you] the set of documents we go after in that type of case,” Von Schoeler said.

The form, which includes basic tracking information that links it back to a specific matter in the legal department's matter management system, also aims to guide paralegals through the collection processes. “There are 30 document types we go after and if you forget how to get one of them, there is a help button [on the form] that tells you how to access it and whom to contact.”

Von Schoeler added that there are also fields on the tracking form that record when paralegals “made an internal request for a document, when it was received and when we turned it around and shared it with outside counsel.”

While helping to streamline the legal department's data collection processes, the recent innovations are likely just the beginning of a broader change for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance's legal department.

Von Schoeler noted that the company hopes to integrate the interactive form and knowledge repository directly into the matter management system in the future. The department also aims to leverage the information it acquires from the form to identify and address areas that cause the most problems for its data collection processes.

“If there is a particular data type we record, that we have to routinely have to ask a couple of times, maybe there is something wrong with our process,” Von Schoeler said. “And we should be looking to improve that.”