Each year in e-discovery brings predictable lessons—lessons on how to be more efficient, how to handle emerging challenges presented by newer data types, and how to handle exponential growth in data volume—and most of us are familiar with the drill. While those lessons remain important, last year pushed us to learn significantly more lessons beyond those. In this two-part series, we'll first revisit the key e-discovery lessons we learned in 2020 and then explore how we will incorporate these into our work in 2021.

We have the benefit of working in an Am Law 50 firm, where we support a diverse portfolio of work, have well-established relationships with innovative clients, retain significant institutional knowledge, and possess autonomy with creative pricing and support solutions—all of which positioned us to respond thoughtfully and effectively to the challenges presented in 2020.

Solving new challenges faster than ever before. Before COVID-19, we frequently relied on in-person contacts to facilitate preservation, collection, and transfer of large data volumes. With significant limits on in-person contacts and mandated remote work, we've had to find creative solutions around discovery and trial support, including shared desktops set up to download, prepare, and transmit incoming and outgoing media remotely and quickly. As e-discovery attorneys and professionals, we also had to determine rapidly how to recalibrate support. Instead of supporting teams in-office, we shifted to a more geography-agnostic model with extended coverage hours for technical support.