[Case Study: eDiscovery]

eDiscovery Improvement for Global Services Company

The challenge: High profile litigation is part of this global service company’s reality. With a highly dispersed workforce and a culture that encourages individualism (so that local customer needs are met), reducing litigation risk is tough. The goals: reduce the size of the information pile (especially in email), develop defensible and cost-effective discovery processes, and manage electronic records effectively.

Access Sciences has a long-standing relationship with this company and has helped them in many facets of their business to improve operations and reduce risk. For example, this includes (many years before it was an industry norm) global installation of a major ECM system to manage their records. 

In this particular assignment, the team was challenged to improve the client’s ability to manage electronic discovery (eDiscovery). In the context of also installing matter management and archiving software, the client was keenly aware that proactively managing email could immediately and tangibly reduce their litigation risk and discovery costs.

Access Sciences assisted this client in a project to:

• Review a suggested email strategy against information management best practices
• Evaluate ECM solutions to find one that could support their email strategy and other ECM needs
• Develop and execute on an email information architecture with a pilot user group
• Advise on how to integrate the solution with existing platforms

The outcome:  Still in progress, this client’s project is well on the way to reducing the cost and risk of email storage by making classification accessible and part of the end user’s normal work patterns. With new tools and better practices, the costs and time  required for discovery processes are on their way down, and the accuracy of the results are improving.