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The Value Proposition of E-Discovery Project Management

It’s been over five years since the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were revised to clearly instruct and encourage litigators to engage early in managing electronically stored information. I’ve been in the litigation support industry since 1995 and project management skills have always been important to the success of litigation matters for which technology was involved. The Sedona Conference published a proclamation a few years ago stating the value of cooperation and project management methodology best practices in e-discovery. Recently, I shared this article outlining the value of project management with my students and thought you might like to read it as well. Here are the key points with my commentary… you can read the whole article here.

The value proposition for project management goes something like this. It takes time and effort to proactively manage a project. This cost is more than made up for over the life of the project by:

  • Completing projects more quickly and cheaply. – Cost and litigation budgets in general are typically the focus of the client. Most corporations have project managers within their business model and expect that their lawyers and legal teams do also. It’s not just about being quick and cheap but more so about not wasting time and money.
  • Being more predictable.    How can we predict costs and schedules if every litigation or e-discovery project reinvents the wheel? Project documentation includes metrics.
  • Saving effort and cost with proactive scope management. How much data (ESI) do we need to review? How much of it is relevant? What tools and resources exist to help us only review what we need to? An experienced e-discovery project manager can help you to navigate these waters.
  • Better solution “fit” the first time through better planning.  -
    My motto in litigation support has always been: The tools are not as important as the process. Define your process, then select the right tool for the job.
  •  Resolving problems more quickly.  Project management includes a communications and problem solving plan/ protocol.
  •  Resolving future risk before the problems occur.
    Experience and metrics will allow you to assess risks and plan a solution or solution options in advance.
  • Communicating and managing expectations with clients, team members and stakeholders more effectively. Managing expectations is a big deal. This is extremely difficult to do without the guidance of a project manager and a documented plan of action.
  •  Building a higher quality product the first time.  Improved financial management. This article is targeted to an audience of software developers but this sentiment applies in e-discovery, too. Think: document production.
  • Stopping “bad” projects more quickly. If a project is being effectively managed, someone will notice a problem before it turns into a train wreck.
  • More focus on metrics and fact-based decision making. Decisions based in facts derived from well documented metrics will provide the consistency of methodology, the courts are looking for.
  • Improved work environment. Who doesn’t want to work with a bunch of happy people?

 People who complain that project management is a lot of ‘overhead’ forget the point. All projects are managed. The question is how effectively they are managed.

A lot can be said for the value of project management in e-discovery… if you don’t have a project manager on your litigation team don’t worry, you can learn… keep reading this blog. ;-)

 

An Animated View of Lawyers at a Rule 26f Conference « e-Discovery Team

Great teaching tool  – ice breaker, opener to a lesson on Rule 26f


An Animated View of Lawyers at a Rule 26f Conference « e-Discovery Team.


“I’m sorry, but the truth is, most attorneys today are like the clueless plaintiff’s counsel in this vignette. They do not talk about electronic discovery at all, even though the federal rules say they should. They avoid it. They fear it, primarily because they are untrained, and do not  know what to do. If opposing counsel brings it up, you are likely to get the kind of reaction you see in this video.” – eDiscovery Team

Recently Found on Twitter

I wanted to title this post “Found on Twitter this Week” but I actually started writing it a few weeks ago… the information isn’t stale – at least I hope not. When I first started tweeting and following other Tweeters last year, I found myself looking at updates several times a day. Then I realized that I was tweeting and retweeting and reading articles that were linked to a tweet so much that I couldn’t get any of my “real work” done. It was so much good info… I naively thought that I could keep up and write a weekly post on what I’d found on Twitter. Ha ha ha! Reality set in and now I check daily but I limit myself to just a few tweets, retweets and everything else, I send myself an email to look at it later when I have an hour just for reviewing what I’ve found. So now that I have some time to review what I’ve found recently, I thought it would be selfish of me to keep it all to myself… especially for those of you who don’t follow Twitter …

** I saw a press release announcing the new edition of Michael Arkfeld’s book Electronic Discovery and Evidence

** Cloud computing is becoming more acceptable and mainstream in the business IT world. This article provides some key points that I believe future law suits and conflicts or issues with evidence stored in the cloud. The following quote is from the section that addresses e-discovery:

Considering that multiple copies of data may be created, stored, recompiled, dispersed, reassembled, and reused, determining what constitutes a “record” or a “document” for discovery purposes may be difficult to achieve in the cloud.

There is a “part 2” to this article which I also recommend. It includes useful checklists for corporate legal teams to address before entering into a cloud computing contract.

** In an article about controlling e-discovery costs, I found a popular e-discovery truth to actually be more of an urban legend or myth: cases don’t settle because the e-discovery costs are too high. Wow! Earth shattering news! Here’s the quote:

In my experience with commercial litigation, while e-discovery costs can be substantial, a case will rarely settle simply to avoid discovery costs when the amount in controversy exceeds it by several orders of magnitude. Even in smaller cases – like disputes with former employees – the cost of discovery driven by notice pleading is unlikely to force settlement because trial courts will grant relief from overly broad discovery requests.

This is why e-discovery project management is sooo vital an element to the case.  EDPMs have metrics available and can provide attorneys with the necessary information to make the strategic decisions early in the matter in order to avoid lopsided costs and spending.

** Another article I found thanks to twitter on this topic is geared towards attorneys:  “ 8 Things to Help Contain the Cost & Risk of Litigation”

** I’m a regular reader on PM Student’s blog. Do you wish you had at least 15 more hours every week to devote to your life outside of work?

Perhaps I’ll make it a point to clear out my inbox next week and share some of the other interesting things I’ve found lately on Twitter. In the meantime, you don’t have to have a Twitter account to view my tweets at twitter.com/lsptrainer.

Where in the World is Erika Santiago?

I know there is probably some sort of blogging rule against this but I’m posting this information on both of my blogs since some of the readership doesn’t overlap. Next week, I will be out and about here in Atlanta moderating a panel discussion for ALSP (Association of Litigation Support Professionals) and the next day speaking on project management for  ASDFED (The American Society for Digital Forensics & e-Discovery).

Learn more here on my Litigation Support Trainers blog. I hope to see YOU there and finally have a chance to meet you in person. :-)

Which PM Methodology is the “Right One” for Your EDD Project?

We’ve heard / read a lot lately about the increasing importance and visibility of project management in e-discovery. This leads me to ask: Which PM methodology or approach really makes the most sense for managing litigation and/or e-discovery projects today? Which one is working for you? Why?

There are three project management methodologies that have surfaced in the e-discovery industry (so far):

1. Project Management Institute - PMI / PMBOK. This is what we generally know as project management.

2. Six Sigma - quite a few corporate legal departments over the years have implemented this project management methodology. Jeff Beard wrote about Six Sigma a few years ago on his blog… and it seems that some law firms have taken his advice.

3. Agile project management – this is a more collaborative approach, self organizing instead of role or power-based… the success of the team is the focus … I recently came across a good argument for why Agile project management might be the next “big thing” in e-discovery project management. Agile project management is really about software development so it takes a bit of imagination to critically think about how to apply it to e-discovery project management. In the blog, the author is critiquing the EDRM to show how Agile can be applied… I would add that she’s not the only one who has recently posed questions about how we (as an industry) apply the EDRM and/or adopt it as our standard workflow. I fully expect this part of the conversation to continue. Perhaps that is a topic for another post… today, let’s discuss which approach to project management will work best for your e-discovery project?

What do you think?

I have my own thoughts… but I’m really interested in what works for you.

Making the Case for e-Discovery Project Management

Electronic Discovery project management is not limited to IT professionals or Litigation Support Professionals. It also includes paralegals and most importantly the attorneys themselves who are traditionally are our project sponsors. It is definitely a team effort. Today’s litigators must take on the role of project leader or at the very least engage in a more involved understanding of what is going on with the e-discovery projects related to the case. Roles & responsibilities on a project team are not necessarily defined by the traditional roles we are familiar with in the legal environment like attorney, litigation support professional, paralegal, database analyst, the “IT Guy.”

In recent months many in our industry have been very outspoken about the function and best practices of e-discovery project management. Do you feel the need to “make a business case” for project management at your organization? Follow the links below to see some of the key points you may need to make regarding why your organization needs to focus more on project management roles and best practices for every member of your case team.

This conversation began in large part as a result of The Sedona Conference’s white paper on achieving quality found here.

Ralph Losey probably has been the most outspoken on this topic.  Any of his recent blog posts will help you to make the case for project management but I’m going to specifically recommend this one from last May.  And don’t skip the comments… great feedback from his readers.

You can listen to a podcast from ESI Bytes.

Check out Mike McBride‘s blog series on his firm’s e-discovery blog. Parts One, Two and Three.

What is the value of Six Sigma in litigation project management or e-discovery? Paul Easton asks on his recent blog post.

How much should attorneys rely on IT to perform litigation project management? This post from the U.K. gives some food for thought.

And finally…after you’ve listened and read through all of the above… you can hit ‘em with this quote from the Law Technology News article summarizing the results of this years’ Socha-Gelbman report:

“Project management has grown in prominence as a means to minimize missteps and deliver more predictable, reliable, and cost-effective results.” – Seventh Annual Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey- LTN Article summarizing the results

I had some other links I could share, shoot me an email and I’ll happily send them to you too… electronic discovery project management is a hot topic these days and will continue to increase in importance as corporate legal departments, government agencies and law firms look to those with project management skills to “deliver more predictable, reliable and cost-effective results.”

Imagine if everyone managed their email well?

If everyone managed their email well, then we might not have so much to do as ediscovery project managers … but since they typically don’t … we get to keep busy.

When I read John Mancin’s recent blog post about managing email, I looked at it first from the ediscovery perspective and second from it’s intended time management learning objective.  Read it now for its time management value — as a project manager, managing your time is one of the keys to success.

Then we will take a look at it from an ediscovery point of view together here:

John walks us through an easy 8-step program to regain control of lost time to managing our in boxes. He  describes some of the reasons for ediscovery challenges and places to look for relevant ediscovery.

#3. Reduce colleague spam, both what you send and what you receive.

This is a can be a problem on your electronic discovery projects but it’s generally easily overcome through culling and deduplication. This is a culture question that should be part of your PM checklist when planning for your document/ESI collection.

#4. Reduce attachment spam.

Here’s where it starts to get interesting… in step 4, he tells us to reduce the number of attachments we send out. Good idea. However, another challenge we often see in ediscovery projects is identifying which file is the original or most up-to-date version of the document. We have tools/ technology for dealing with this issue too …. near deduplication.

Something else worth pointing out is the trend in the ECM (enterprise content management) world to get rid of attachments altogether and simply allow email users to create a link to the file on the server so that it resides in a single location. I wrote about this a while back. This is a trend that will reduce the volume  of ESI for ediscovery eventually however, it also means that as ediscovery project managers we have to add this to our identification / collection phase checklists.

#6. Don’t use email as a filing cabinet.

Wow! Thousands of examples are available on other blogs about the perils of  #6 in litigation…

ESI is encoded in many different ways, and it’s quite common for these encoded objects to be nested like Russian matryoshka dolls: a Word document inside a Zip archive attached to an e-mail message within a compressed Outlook PST container file residing on an encrypted volume. Each nested object is encoded differently from its parent and child objects, and even within the body of a single document or file, encoding changes as content changes.

  • If I receive e-mail data from my client as a PST, then it’s a container that is not organized in easy to manage records. As an ediscovery project manager one of the things to consider with regards to searching and processing the data is our plan to deal with  nested files within the PST.
  • Attorneys generally understand that most people use their in box as a filing cabinet so they typically will request this information in discovery. However, this is a limited view of what could potentially be relevant to the case… we’ll discuss this further when we get to #8 on John’s list.

#8. Use the right tool for the job.

I totally agree about using the right tool for the job… but as we’ve discussed already here, many don’t… so where else should we be looking for information? We already mentioned home computers… I would add Wikis, Blogs and Twitter to the list as well as company-managed instant messages and digitized voice mail.

E-mail is one of our necessary evils when it comes to project management. It’s great to have the resource to communicate with our teams, unfortunately, if we allow ourselves to become a slave to its constant interruptions throughout the day, then we risk missing deadlines for our projects. I am a big fan of closing Outlook for a few hours each day so that I can get some work done without interruption. Same goes for allowing calls to roll to voice-mail… See John’s steps: 1, 2, 5 and 7 for more pointers to free yourself from your e-mail.

When you’re working with your case teams on the identification phase of a litigation matter, ask them if they send email home or use their in box as a filing cabinet… odds are that their clients do too.

Resources found this week on Twitter – June 5

Each week, I’m going to write a short post listing (perhaps with comment) resources found thanks to Twitter.  Feel free to comment and let me know which resources work best for you and/or how you would apply them to e-discovery.

pmstudent shared the following

AceProject shared this Dilbert cartoon on stakeholder management.

Take Away From International Litigation Support Leaders Conference

I attended this conference with two colleagues.  One an IT professional like myself, and the other a “super” paralegal.  I had high hopes for good ideas on how to better manage Litigation Support projects, as they tend to be a beast of their own.

We learned ideas for tracking our sub projects within projects from initiation of a case through closure and data destruction.  One thing I got excited about was the idea of a technical specification model.  At the onset of a project, write up the scope of work being done.  As the project goes on, version the scope with each change that comes along and have this as an audit trail for everything that is done to discovery and requested by the case team throughout the case.

One thing also discussed is the constant battle between deadlines and the time it takes to do what we, in Litigation Support, do. What will always be the case?  Court deadlines, changing time lines and the fact that as hard as we try to work with our case teams (attorneys, paralegals, clients, client IT, co-counsel, experts, in-house IT,etc) the name of the game is time and money.  The most common strategy that I’ve seen attorneys take is wait as long as possible before cracking into the e-discovery side of the case and try to work toward settlement.  Why?  This is an expensive part of the case.  We all know that.  Sometimes a cost higher than the worth of the case itself.  The challenge on the Litigation Support side is that it takes the time to preserve, collect, inventory, process, QC, cull, QC, review, QC, produce, QC any discovery. (did I mention QC?)

So that is the question I felt I left the conference unanswered.  How do we work with attorneys and case teams to educate them on the timelines for e-discovery so that they can better weigh the putting off of dealing with discovery issues for the sake of case strategy?

My one disappointment of the conference was that, while I love a good crack at attorneys, there was more than just a subtle rhetoric pointing to attorneys being our big challenge.  More than once paralegals were pointed out as paranoid and in the way.  Being as I work in a law firm it would not be healthy for me to view the attorneys or paralegals as part of the problem, however tempting that may be.  I don’t think that was the goal of any discussion at this well put together conference.  It was however constantly discussed and I feel that we have a responsibility to turn this conversation around.

First, paralegals are my best friends my com padres and my allies.  When an attorney contacts me on a case, if they do not already have a paralegal involved I encourage them get one involved.  1/2 the time this prevents me from doing the work of a paralegal.  The other 1/2 I can work with the paralegal with time lines, case setup, and me doing my work, the paralegal doing what they do best and presenting the attorney with what they need.

Second, attorneys pay my paycheck, so while I do prefer to be treated as an equal, respect must be paid.  I believe that the attorney / not an attorney line can change, and the burst of a need for IT Litigation Support to be involved in attorneys lives is an opportunity to do just that.  Litigation Support is a skilled industry involving a good deal of IT knowledge and PM ability.  Requiring this type of aptitude in individuals hired to these positions will slowly get to the attorneys in the form of a recognition that we are a valuable member of the team. One such discussion during the conference pointed ou that we as an industry will be better served if we present our services as consulting/expert(ise) rather that just support/data processing/etc.  Yes, sometimes we burn cd’s but what we did to get that cd together involved a lot of knowledge and awareness of issues like spoliation and privilege.

From the Lit Support side it is important to recognize that attorneys do know what they are doing, and that they are intelligent.  Rather than an obstacle, it is an opportunity we must take to constantly educate attorneys about what we do, why we do it and how. This is not the kind of overnight shift in paradigms that we would all like.  This is more one attorney or a couple of attorneys at a time.  Working with a partner is always a good idea because they will help with buy-in. Going after new associates in groups is also necessary as getting them on the bandwagon early can encourage going in the right path from the beginning.

All-in-All it was a wonderful conference.  I got to see a lot of familiar faces, talk with vendors about new and exciting technology (what can I say, I am IT and that is what excites me) and there were a lot of good discussions about what we do on a day to day basis.  It is a long time coming that there is a conference for IT Litigation Support Professionals.  Well done Litigation Support Today for getting this together for us!

- Courtney

The end of email attachments?

I just saw this on Twitter:  @EasyECM: Learning Content Management vs. Enterprise Content Management. Are they merging? Take the poll http://easyecm.blogspot.com/

Many of us have had to explain the concept of the parent-child relationship in e-discovery to our case teams at one time or another. Now, let’s take a step back or on the left of the EDRM to the “information management” stage.  Or if you’ve been on 451′s site today, then “information governance” . . . In order for us to be effective in managing e-discovery projects one of the first things we need to know is how does the corporate client store and manage their information?

Here’s a teaser quote from the blog post on enterprise content management… let’s discuss how this will impact e-discovery projects today… tomorrow… a year from now…

For example, 55% of AIIM survey respondents report they have “little or no confidence” that important emails are recorded, complete or recoverable. (That’s just a small improvement compared to the prior year’s results of 62% “non-confidence”). Considering that US courts regard email as an electronic record, that could become an expensive problem should a business find itself involved in litigation.

In the same AIIM survey 27% of respondents also reported that email attachments were “very unmanaged”.

Keep reading…