With corporations' data becoming increasingly digitized, IT departments are being asked to play bigger roles in supporting their corporate legal departments
By William E. Mooz, Jr. and Bruce Kiefer, Catalyst Repository Systems
At the simplest level, you can reduce e-discovery technical challenges to scalability, performance, and data security. This article also covers other considerations of return on investment (ROI) and minimizing risk.
Review Platform Challenges
1. Scalability
The first challenge associated with litigation review platforms is knowing what scale you need. Like many applications, litigation review platforms suffer from large spikes in demand. However, unlike many applications where the spikes are fairly predictable (end of month, 9:00, or 5:00, etc.), litigation is almost impossible to predict. Litigants file lawsuits without warning, large-scale discovery may or may not occur, and cases can settle or be dismissed at any time.
The size of the spike a single large case can generate has increased significantly in recent years. A large case can now mean sorting through hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data. Getting through this data quickly, and with no downtime, is paramount as many lawyers make up review teams, each billing hundreds of dollars per hour.
Historically, review platforms were built to run on a single server, or even a desktop machine, and law firms and corporate legal departments ran them in house. This worked fine when discovery involved a few boxes worth of documents, and presented manageable challenges to IT departments in terms of space, power, administration, cost, etc. It does not work so well in the current environment.
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