eDiscovery Consulting & Advisory

eDiscovery Advice Without the Stress

Our experts care about your eDiscovery strategy and work hard to help you win.

Many consultants are typically more interested in billing time than helping find the root of problems and fixing them quickly. That’s not the case at BIA. We take a rapid approach to discover the issues at play and come up with smart solutions within tight time constraints and budgets.

Prepare

Do you have your house in order?

Many eDiscovery preparedness questions can be addressed by creating an internal document that we call an eDiscovery playbook.

The following points and more are covered in the playbook:

• Creation of a team including a C-level executive, an IT resource, and a vendor that can assemble in short order when there’s an inkling of a litigation event on the horizon. 
• Train and educate your management and key line personnel to be able to identify when a triggering event that may lead to litigation occurs. 
• Assemble the information that you have identified regarding the event and share it with your legal advisor/counsel to enable them to draft, issue and maintain a defensible litigation hold. 
• Your team should be organized in such a way that once the hold is issued proper preservation steps are taken across the organization to be certain that all relevant ESI (email, databases, specialized data systems, text messages, social media, cell phones, tablets, file shares, etc.) is protected. (The same holds true for hard copy documents.) 
• Identify resources to assist you in collecting, processing, reviewing and producing documents if and when the time comes.   

All of these questions — and many more — can be addressed in the playbook. That becomes your process and protocol document which can be vetted by eDiscovery experts such as BIA in conjunction with your outside counsel.  Once it is created and shared with your team — and the culture is introduced to your organization — you then have a defensible process that is repeatable matter after matter and mitigates the opportunity for opposing parties to riddle your discovery efforts with deficiency and spoliation claims. 

Identify

Locate information and data relevant to the matter at hand.

You don’t want to miss any relevant data repositories, which means the ever-expanding set of tools available to users, including cooperative programs such as Teams and Slack must be evaluated as sources of relevant data. Of course, today, text messaging apps, cell phones, tablets, cloud storage and social media must also be considered in addition to the traditional resources of email, file shares and laptops. As consultants, we can guide you through the process of data identification.   

Ask the custodians:

• Interview key custodians/project leads most knowledgeable about the matter.
• Prepare a custodian questionnaire (CQ) tailored to the client and the specific needs of the instant litigation.
• The CQ can then be distributed to all likely custodians for the matter with their answers given back in report form.
• Answers can then readily be compared and contrasted with further actions such as adding other identified custodians or identified data resources to the matter.

Review case filings – complaints and requests for production of documents:

• Assist in the identification of search terms used to limit the number of reviewable documents promoted to the document review platform.
• Use various advanced analytic tools that accomplish email threading, near deduplication and technology assisted review (TAR) as appropriate in any given matter.

Execute

Document productions must be done right.

The last major consideration in most eDiscovery matters is the method and form of production of data. We find ourselves quite often surprised when we join a matter in mid-stream that even very experienced counsel has not addressed this key area. How documents are produced affects how they can be used for deposition and trial preparation.   

• Documents should be searchable 
• Pages should be Bates numbered 
• Deduplication should be clearly called out: intra-custodian or global 
• Metadata fields should be specified

All of these points and more should be addressed in an ESI production protocol. The model protocol that BIA has prepared addresses these and more. A well-crafted protocol will allow for an orderly ESI review and production, save time — which translates to saving money — and will result in a better work product for the client and counsel.