A Case for eDiscovery (Part 1)

By Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) Sep 23, 2008

A while back, we wrote about how companies are not in the habit of retaining and organizing their documents in a logical structure — which, in turn, is driving up their legal costs. The article fueled a frenzy of feedback from companies in the eDiscovery business.

They wanted to offer information about their services, and we saw it as an opportunity to pick their brains about what goes into the process, the challenges facing the industry and where the future of eDiscovery will take us.

Case Central

CaseCentral, a company working out of San Francisco and New York City, is 15 years old and helps its clients — mostly, corporations and general counsels within companies — to process, analyze and present the data housed within an organization.

We spoke with their CMO, Steve d'Alencon, about the ins and outs of CaseCentral's services and solutions.

Following the industry's well-known model called the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), CaseCentral mainly works on the right side of the model, implementing their company-specific Evidence Management Platform. The EMP is a multi-matter and multi-party platform, which they consider to be an integral part of the eDiscovery process, as it works to improve the quality and reduce the risk and cost associated with optimizing the eDiscovery supply chain.

CaseCentral usually becomes involved with a company after an event has triggered the need for information to be retained — usually, as the result of litigation. Companies become involved in hundreds of lawsuits each year. Most of them are handled by different firms, using different software products — many of them, if not all, incompatible and providing inconsistent processes. CaseCentral is the unifying body employed to sync all the data and processes as one entity.

There are four primary sources of information contributed by an organization to the eDiscovery process:

People generating content inside or outside the organization
Content: In all its different print and electronic forms, including email and IMs. It is all subject to search
Technology: The types of software used to organize, analyze and archive the information generated
Event-based impetus that instigated the discovery process, whether a lawsuit or compliance issue. The relevance of the documents depends upon the nature of the event that spearheaded the investigation.

With these factors, the process can become very untidy, inefficient and costly. CaseCentral's EMP allows for content, people and technology to be shared on the same platform, where all parties involved can collaborate. With such a platform, they can focus more on what d'Alencon calls “process analytics” as opposed to “data analytics”. By analyzing the process, clients are able to keep better track of their budgets and time and check how their metrics compare to industry average costs. Using an Intranet dashboard display, customers have an overview of their metrics to help them stay on course.

CaseCentral says that their EMP is the only multi-matter, multi-party platform out there that is a SaaS model, which allows for an “instant on,” scalability to the company's needs and accessibility to all who need access to it.

Having worked almost exclusively with law firms up until about five years ago, CaseCentral's average client nowadays is an outside counsel representing a company being served. CaseCentral, like other firms in the industry, can be held liable for their services, which makes their commitment to accuracy and delivery even more important.