4.
Know-how and knowledge re-use: A
Shifting the Cost-Benefit
Paradigm in Litigation
By Bob Smith, President, The Americas, ISYS Search Software
T he cost-benefit tango that legal profes-
sionals do during early case assessment
comes down to one simple go/no-go factor:
legal costs.
Thanks to ever-increasing legal costs and
case complexities, attorneys are often left
thinking, “My client has a better chance of win-
ning ‘Dancing With The Stars’ than they do
winning this case.” But here’s the dirty little
secret: it’s not because the client’s case does-
n’t have merit or it couldn’t stand up in court;
it’s because the costs to go to trial are just too
risky to entertain.
Ironically, technology is primarily to blame
for this issue. Analysts point to incessant infor-
mation explosion, with estimates that digital
content will continue to grow 50% annually.
That means more email, more PDFs and quite
simply more “stuff” for a legal team to iden-
tify, collect, preserve, review, analyze, etc., dur-
ing the course of litigation.
And while memory might be dirt cheap
these days, the per-gigabyte review charges
you’re incurring are not. Hence why we’re set-
tling so many cases these days, rather than
leveraging technology to make our lives easier
and our jobs more effective.
Search and Rescue
For a number of years, search has been
treated as an afterthought and seen as a “nice-
to-have” hammer in the toolkit. Even in legal
circles, attorneys and their staff have been
mostly content to use the built-in capabilities
of their case management system.
But let’s be clear on one point: if you’re
unable to conduct meaningful and immedi-
ate filtering of content before loading it into
your case management system or sending it
off for review, too often you’re going to err
on the side of caution and settle out of court.
In some situations, that might absolutely
be the correct call. But wouldn’t you want
to make that call yourself, and not let tech-
nology deficiencies decide it for you? More
importantly, if you’re the defendant, should-
n’t you demand that your legal team have
better capabilities in place?
To be certain, there is no magic-bullet tech-
nology answer to the e-discovery conundrum.
But in terms of role players in this process,
search is critical and more than up to the task
in the following key ways:
S18 KMWorld February 2010
1. Legal cost reduction: If the decision to
settle or go to trial hinges on how voluminous
and complex e-discovery review will be, then
clearly you’ll have a different answer if you
already have a search tool capable of doing
rapid and meaningful filtering of this content,
prior to submitting it to expensive review. The
fact of the matter is that some technology ven-
dors and some law firms have a distinct com-
petitive advantage because they already have
these tools.
“Processing, reviewing
and analyzing e-discovery
content are clearly where
a case can fail or succeed.
Nowhere is search more
prevalent and necessary
than in these stages.”
2. Sophisticated processing, review and
analysis: It’s probably not fair to say that any
single stage of the electronic discovery refer-
ence model is more important than the other.
But the steps of processing, reviewing and ana-
lyzing e-discovery content are clearly where a
case can fail or succeed, both from a cost per-
spective and outcome standpoint. Nowhere is
search more prevalent and necessary than in
these stages.
3. Answers without obstacles: Too often,
key stakeholders want on-the-fly answers to
straightforward questions. But when the
source material is locked up inside a case man-
agement system, usually an answer is anything
BUT “on the fly.” And what happens if the
source material resides in some unknown loca-
tion outside your primary system? Only search
can provide this single point of access to your
distributed data and do so without significant
ongoing costs.
law firm’s work product is only as valuable as
its ability to access and re-use this content.
Whether you have a dedicated know-how
repository, document management system, col-
lection of repositories or all of the above, search
is the one solution that enables unified access
to these key assets.
The Bottom Line
Let’s face it: the bottom line is the “bottom
line.” Like most things in life, early case assess-
ment and go/no-go decisions are generally gov-
erned by simple economics. Consider that
litigation is costing companies upwards of
$18,000 per gigabyte of e-discovery content
reviewed. But firms with well-defined “litiga-
tion preparedness” processes are reducing IT
and legal costs by an average of 30%.
There’s no question that search serves an
important role here, whether it is embedded
as a best-in-class component in an e-dis-
covery system or is sitting at the server level
in your corporate infrastructure. You’ll find
no shortage of examples of companies that
are doing just that today.
◆ Talk to Aderant about how they’ve inno-
vated at a faster pace by incorporating
best-in-class search;
◆ Hit up EMC to find out how important
search and content mining is to its
SourceOne platform and its ability to out-
perform the competition;
◆ Find out how American Express leverages
search to manage 4 million email mes-
sages... all day, every day;
◆ Spend some time with international engi-
neering firm Costain to learn how it uses
search to prevent regulation breach; and
◆ Learn how Astra Zeneca ensures compli-
ance with the Data Protection Act and
other regulations.
Perhaps most important as it relates to the
part search plays in the legal industry: it is tech-
nology that can be implemented in a matter of
days and at a fraction of the cost of most e-dis-
covery solutions. Better still, it is well-known
to reduce legal costs substantially, thus ensur-
ing your total cost of e-discovery ownership is
at a level that supports your ability to remain
competitive.
At the end of the day, you can continue
to take tango lessons, or you can own the
dance studio that sells the lessons. ❚
Established in 1988, ISYS Search Software is a global
supplier of enterprise search solutions for information
access, management and re-use. The company’s award-
winning software suite offers a broad range of search,
navigation and discovery solutions for enterprise search,
mobile search and embedded search applications. ISYS
has been deployed by thousands of organizations oper-
ating in a variety of industries, including government,
legal, law enforcement, financial services, healthcare
and recruitment.