While the COVID-19 pandemic may be causing some aspects of life to come to a standstill, the wheels of e-discovery continue to turn—albeit a little more slowly than they did before. To keep workflows running on schedule, e-discovery vendors may find themselves having to take a more hands-on approach in helping their homebound workers navigate an increasingly crowded information superhighway.

Wendy King, a senior managing director in the Discovery practice at FTI Consulting, referred to e-discovery professionals working remotely as "the last mile," otherwise known as the final leg in the delivery of information. "We're being mindful of the fact that things are going to take a little bit longer because of the fact that folks are going to have to work 100% remote now," King said.

And it's not just the e-discovery industry. Last week, the New York Times reported that the surge of internet traffic that has accompanied the many stay-at-home orders being issued by state governments is causing download speeds and video quality to lag.  This is of particular importance to e-discovery though, where high volumes of data and even video are par for the course.

David Greetham, vice president of e-discovery at Ricoh USA, illustrated the problem as a tale of two bandwidths. Office environments typically favor dedicated bandwidth, which is ring-fenced to ensure that it is reserved solely for one subscriber or business. It's usually more expensive than shared bandwidth, which is most commonly used in residential homes. That method splits a specific segment of bandwidth among multiple users, such as family, roommates or even neighbors.

For that reason, shared bandwidth isn't an ideal medium for key e-discovery functions such as data transfers, a task where Greetham has already noticed some slowdowns. "The problem tends to be on the client end if they are trying to do it from their domestic location. If they are remotely accessing their office and initiating some transfer from their office from their commercial bandwidth to our commercial bandwidth, we're really not seeing much of a problem."

As a precaution, Ricoh is urging employees to avoid scheduling data transfers between 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time, when they've found traffic to be heaviest. Early afternoons and evenings have yielded fewer issues. Once client data is in Ricoh's possession, the rest of the process has been moving smoothly.

Fortunately for the company's workflows, many appear to be transferring data by accessing their office's dedicated commercial bandwidth remotely instead of relying entirely on a segmented household or "domestic" internet connection. "We have not changed our estimated time of completion, because in most cases we've seen that commercial data transfer rather than domestic," Greetham said.

Still, e-discovery professionals that only use their domestic connection may have bigger problems than just scheduling transfers. Raj Chandrasekar, chief technology officer at Consilio, said that it may be wireless networks rather than the internet itself that are causing slow-downs, arguing that there aren't enough Wi-Fi channels to process all of the traffic generated by multiple devices operating in a single household or neighborhood.

He suggested that physically connecting a computer or device to a modem may be the most prudent course of action. "You've got much less or no signal interference not to say better security because you're using wired connections rather than a wi-fi," Chandrasekar said.

But that may not help with the traffic-related slowdowns he's noticed on video conferencing platforms like Zoom. Consilio leverages video conferencing as part of its document review service to verify the identities of employees working remotely and ensure that they are working from a secure location.  The drain streaming video has on bandwidth—not to mention the competition from Netflix feeds—is not lost on Chandrasekar, who suggests people temporarily forego 4K definition for something more standard.

"Simple things that we can do in working with people to try and educate them have been a big part of this exercise," Chandrasekar said.