doeLEGAL Journal

Originally published in this article, a discussion was started in the LinkedIn Group ControllingLegalCosts by Laura Johnson, Esq. entitled "The Rich [Lawyers] Gets Richer". In this article they discuss:

A key aspect of eDiscovery is the fact that the term "electronic records" covers everything that is stored on hard drives, servers, cell phones and any form of electronic storage. Here is where establishing the Legal Hold is important. Following a planned plan-of-action when a litigation hits is crucial to retaining each document. Maintaining a constant Chain of Custody involving all data that may be pertinent to the matter avoids risk of costly court imposed sanctions later.

eDiscovery is still on relatively new ground when it comes to its uses during the legal process. Some judges are siding with privacy concerns, for example - refusing to grant subpoenas to uncover the identity of an anonymous Internet user. A lawyer has to present a strong argument as to why they need to find the name behind an IP address. Social media posts are easier to use in some court cases as the identity of the individuals in question are more clearly defined. Again, it all comes down to the disposition of the jurist who is overseeing the case as to what is and is not allowed into evidence.

The electronic era of communications is still an emerging area for eDiscovery. Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) covers how to produce electronic documents for discovery, including hard drives and other forms of electronic storage. This rule provides a crystal clear procedure to follow in order to obtain information from the opposing party and how it is to be handled. As the rules continue to evolve, so must our methods and practices to ensure legal technology, as well as the user, keeps pace.

Part 1: Managing complex financial components like alternative fee arrangements, actual vs. budget comparisons, and hourly rates charged by firms require more analysis and metrics than a simple spreadsheet can offer these days. More and more corporations are seeking better legal spend management (often referred to eBilling) tools with deeper reporting and analytics than ever before. doeLEGAL offers ASCENT™ to fill this need. ASCENT™ is an innovative legal spend software solution that helps legal professionals track every aspect of their legal budgets and reduce overall corporate legal spend. How does it do that? Read on…

Legal Project Management (LPM) utilizes a process replication model for success regardless of whether it is designed for litigation or other types of matters. As a systematic approach to budget, plan, and evaluation of case data, the goal of Legal Project Management is to create a collaboration platform where all legal team members and legal service providers have the necessary tools to work independently, but also share their ideas and work together towards a common goal.

Today's corporate legal departments are being asked to trim budgets and lower expenses in an effort to make their organization leaner and more profitable. That is the goal of any growing business so why are we hesitant to welcome this push from above? This hesitation may stem from the daunting task of choosing "one solution to control them all."

Corporate Legal Spend Management is the efficient administration of a corporation’s legal expenditures to minimize legal costs while maximizing operational efficiency and client – attorney relationships. It is paramount to the financial well-being of any corporation that it be sensitive to its legal department’s spend and matter management. An informative white paper that highlights the top five reasons to begin a legal spend management program can be downloaded from doeLEGAL here.

In Part I of this series, "Behind the Asterisk" we looked at the incredible growth of the EDD industry since its evolution in the late 1990s. This explosive evolution and rapid growth led to situations in which EDD vendors first inherited per page pricing from legacy manual litigation management vendors which quickly evolved to a per gigabyte charge model to accommodate increasingly large document collections. This per gigabyte model predominates today in one form or another, but other factors have contributed to the disaggregation of the per gigabyte model and to the addition of new pricing and fees for services which may have once been included in the per gigabyte pricing model for EDD.

The war to create the next new feature, functionality or add-on (the feature/function wars) between legal spend and matter management vendors may or may not be over. What is clear in conversation with peers, competitors and consultants is that most buyers when evaluating systems come away feeling that there are no make or break differences in functionality from one system to the next. Vendors have by and large reached functional parity in this increasingly mature marketplace.