How a Global Corporation Streamlined Disjointed eDiscovery and Saved $400K

The Challenges

PLUSnxt recently assisted a global corporation by helping them take control of a disjointed vendor management situation. For each new litigation case, the client’s team would select an outside counsel firm to represent them – over time, that resulted in multiple outside counsel firms representing them in various cases, dependent on factors such as discipline expertise and case venue.

The client would coordinate with outside counsel to collect electronically stored information (ESI) associated with each case and turn that ESI over to outside counsel. In turn, each outside counsel firm would select their own eDiscovery vendor, so there were multiple eDiscovery vendors supporting The client’s cases – each of which were hosting the ESI in their own instance of Relativity or other eDiscovery solution. The workflow for working with each counsel firm and each eDiscovery vendor was different – from the contract approval process through the lifecycle of the case. The challenges associated with this scenario included:

• Lack of control over the process, as the ESI for each case was being managed by outside counsel and their selected eDiscovery vendor, forcing the client’s in-house team to “jump through hoops” to reach the “right” contacts.
• Lack of data integrity with redundant data located in different data repositories across the different eDiscovery vendors.
• Lack of consistency in applying classifications during review as each review team had minimal experience with the client’s business and specific legal issues.
• Lack of data security consistency as each eDiscovery vendor had a different configuration and profile for securing the data.
• Lack of cost containment due to inefficiencies in everything from contract approvals to data redundancy to different approaches to managing the ESI in discovery.

The Solution

PLUSnxt’s team of experts worked with the client’s in-house team to implement the Accelerator program, which enabled the client to take control of the eDiscovery process for all its cases. With the guided support and partnership of PLUSnxt’s team of Project Managers (PMs) and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Accelerator enabled the client to control its own RelativityOne instance, which enabled them to build out a consistent workflow for their data across all their outside counsel firms. It also gave the client control over that workflow, as their in-house team was able to set up each new case and load their own ESI directly through RelativityOne, then provide access to their outside counsel firm.

Through the implementation and support of the Accelerator program, the PLUSnxt team was able to assist this corporate client in addressing the above challenges to achieve the following results using RelativityOne:

• Become the driver of the process, as the client’s in-house team was responsible for setting up cases, loading the data and providing access to its outside counsel firms (instead of the other way around).
• Improve data integrity through the ability to see all the data within their own single instance of RelativityOne.
• Utilize a first-pass review team through PLUSnxt that understands the client’s business model and legal issues (instead of a new review team having to be trained each time) to help ensure consistency in applying document classifications.
• Leverage RelativityOne’s cloud-first approach to security through Microsoft Azure’s cloud architecture to provide a consistent profile across all their cases and provide a security barrier between users accessing the data and the data itself to protect against data breaches.
• Savings of as much as $400,000 in collection, processing and hosting fees over a single year!

The Benefits

The guided support and partnership of PLUSnxt’s experts through the Accelerator program, enabled the client’s in-house team to take control of its own discovery processes, maintaining greater visibility into their cases, consistency of workflows among outside counsel and uniform security over their data in discovery. All these benefits enabled the client to significantly consolidate eDiscovery spend while enabling outside counsel to focus on high-value work associated with representing its interests. This is an example of how the Accelerator program through PLUSnxt can enable clients to take control of their discovery operations and reap the benefits of that control in terms of greater data integrity, data security, process consistency and cost containment.