I joined Jackson Lewis in May 2010, as a partner and the firm’s national e-discovery counsel. We have built a major electronic data discovery program that includes the assignment of a trained e-discovery liaison attorney in each office, systemic quality controls, practice standardizations and extensive training for all lawyers and paralegals. The office liaisons receive extended training; and all associates must complete eight hours of mandatory training (also recommended for all partners).
After nine months of research and preparation, this June, we decided to outsource to a vendor all of our nonlegal electronic data discovery work that our litigation support department had been providing to our clients. Because Jackson Lewis is a national labor and employment law firm with 49 offices, we needed a vendor that served the entire country and had the capacity to handle high volumes of work. We were also looking for simple, one-stop shopping to handle all of our nonlegal e-discovery needs, including our forensic investigations, collections of electronically stored information, processing, hosting, and advanced software. The review software had to include predictive coding features, and be affordable for all size cases, not just the biggest. We invited bidding from a number of top vendors and received many excellent responses to choose from, e.g., Business Intelligence Associates Inc. and D4 Discovery were finalists, but at the end of the day we had to pick just one vendor and decided to hire Kroll Ontrack.
