With 2020 now in full swing, legal teams need to move from risk to reward if they haven’t done so already. Be sure to avoid these 4 common mistakes if you want to bulletproof your eDiscovery practices and deliver greater value to your clients.
Across all professional services sectors, those granted with the duty of making key decisions are constantly looking into how they can deliver a service that is of higher value, more efficient, more cost-effective, and that simply does better than their competitors.
While these are all more than worthy areas of improvement to invest your time and money into, the benefits they bring can quickly dissipate if your organisation is not adequately protected against operational risk.
And, when you consider that most of the practice improvements required to safeguard your legal team from risk will often bring inherent gains in operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness and value-added service provision anyway, it certainly pays to adopt a defence-first approach.
Read on to learn the 5 all-too-common eDiscovery mistakes that you should avoid to keep the businesses of both yourself and your clients safe.
Mistake 1: Managing data with disparate systems
Legal teams typically face vast amounts of pressure across a wide spread of areas: the need to manage litigation and investigations, respond to regulatory requests, monitor compliance, and keep spending under control being just a few.
But when an equally broad spread of tools and platforms is employed to handle this spread of activity, a number of problems can arise.
As a collective team or department, managing case data effectively is a bit like trying to navigate your way through an area you don’t know – it’s a lot easier to maintain your bearings if you have one single and reliable source guiding you.
Using a number of disconnected tools and platforms to handle individual tasks (or to accommodate the individual working methods of individual team members) on the other hand, can dramatically increase the odds of security breaches, namely by decentralising control of your data and upping the number of locations it can be accessed from.
And if that isn’t enough reason for you to aspire for more streamlined, singular eDiscovery practices, disparate systems also make it practically impossible for decision-makers to gain a holistic view of project data, which can lead to inconsistent analytics that need to be checked and recalculated internally, increase data storage costs by having the same data stored in numerous environments, and generally convolute your operational workflows and foster further process inefficiencies.
Mistake 2: Overlooking the importance of employee retention
This refers to an age-old problem that is true of almost any business, trade or service – the more times sensitive data changes hands, the more likely it is that the data in question will be subject to human error.
This refers to both technical data handling errors as well as instances of instructions being repeatedly relayed and, eventually, lost in translation.
And while the importance of employee retention is common sense to anyone managing a team or running a business, more often than not, if a legal team were to be asked the most effective methods of alleviating risk from their practices and securing the information of their clients, they would look outward rather than inward.
If your clients are happy with your teams as they are, you need to ensure you invest sufficiently in maintaining the people that make those teams.
Focus on keeping your team happy, fulfilled, stimulated and motivated – offer them a career that is both fulfilling and futureproof – eDiscovery is a rapidly growing field and an increasingly attractive employment prospect to many, so be sure to reward enthusiasm in it rather than exploit it, as the chances are if your team doesn’t give its staff the career they want, someone round the corner will.
