Editor's note: This is the first in a four-part series examining the ways in which firms are managing e-discovery work and whether there is profit to be had in such endeavors.
Litigation support services departments in law firms — now largely tasked with helping attorneys manage the e-discovery needs of clients — are at a crossroads. To invest or divest.
Some firms are doubling down and investing millions in e-discovery technology, people and processes, looking to recapture the revenue paid to e-discovery vendors and offer clients a cheaper way to handle their discovery needs all under one roof.
On the other end of the spectrum, firms are doing away with hosting data, buying software, processing electronically stored information and conducting forensic investigations. They would rather leave that to the experts.
And when they ship all of those processes out the door, they are often looking for a preferred vendor, known as managed services providers, who can handle it all across the firm's platform in order to manage efficiency and cost for clients. These firms are choosing to handle only the legal work, which some say is often the more lucrative work, associated with e-discovery.
And of course there is always the gray area — the majority of firms that have a hybrid approach to handling what has become a vexing issue for some clients and an opportunity for others who have taken the matter into their own hands and chosen their own preferred e-discovery vendors.
Jason Lichter joined Pepper Hamilton in September as the firm's director of discovery services and litigation support. His main charge since joining the firm from Seyfarth Shaw is to figure out just where in the spectrum of e-discovery models Pepper Hamilton will fall.
Lichter's new boss, Pepper Hamilton CEO Scott Green, helped create a fully integrated e-discovery operation at his old firm, WilmerHale. There, the people, processes and technology are all housed within WilmerHale's back-office operations near Dayton, Ohio.
Lichter said a similar approach is certainly on the table at Pepper Hamilton, but he is looking at many options. The collection of electronic data, Lichter said, is best performed by certified forensic examiners.
"Pepper as a firm does not presently have any intention of getting into the collections business," Lichter said. "But immediately after collection [comes] processing, filtering and culling and I'm very much including that among which we are addressing."
Lichter said there are different options for where information can be housed, be it internally or on a vendor's server. He said the lawyers who need to access the data don't care where it is, just that it can be retrieved quickly and efficiently.
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