ediscovery

2 years on: 5 ways Covid-19 has changed eDiscovery forever

06 April 2022 | Written by Imogen Fraser-Clark

In a survey of UK and US law firms conducted in May 2020 by Sandpiper Partners, 43% of respondents agreed that the changes brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak would impact their practice forever. Now, two years later, we thought it would be interesting to look at the influencing factors that have continued to bend and reshape the world of eDiscovery and the wider legal sector.

While many of the initial difficulties impacting things such as court deadlines and litigation budgets have thankfully subsided, many other changes that have been brought on or driven by the developments of 2020 look set to stay for the long term. Here are the 5 ways COVID-19 looks to have changed eDiscovery for the long term.

The rise of remote collection and review:

When national lockdowns swept the UK and other countries across the globe, remote working had to be facilitated almost overnight, with 56% of firms in the UK and the US taking steps to ensure their entire fee-earning workforce could work remotely. While for many this was a temporary measure to cope with the sudden disruption to their business infrastructure, it soon began to deliver on a number of benefits. Not only did numerous sources report an uptick in productivity among remote eDiscovery teams, but commentators in the months and years since 2020 have remarked on how positively clients have responded to remote review.

Many specialist eDiscovery providers have found clients prefer the convenience and simplicity of more remote practices, and that it has removed the sense of intrusion and disruption that can, unfortunately, come with on-site forensic data collection.

This might be why 95% of legal professionals reportedly believe that by 2023, cloud-based eDiscovery (enabled by platforms such as RelativityOne) will be the industry norm by 2023. So long as teams conducting review remotely are able to achieve the same levels of productivity and consistency, and can show clients that their security protocols are equipped to handle it, remote document review looks set to be a long-term adjustment.

Openness to innovation

The move towards remote review practices also brought with it a wider change in attitudes and perspectives. Without the luxury of requesting boxes of hard copy documents, eDiscovery teams had to turn to technology. And professionals across all industries experienced a similar phenomenon.

The ripple effect of lockdown measures meant teams were forced to depart from the traditional best practices that had guided them for years, and instead look to more tech-driven ways of achieving business as usual. This has generally opened a door and meant more legal teams are open to exploring technology-driven solutions that they may not have considered in the past, such as AI and Active Learning.