eDiscovery Services as an "App"; Part 2

The Next Step in the Evolution: Flexible Service Delivery

Because of the expertise involved with eDiscovery it requires more than pure technology to implement a service of this type. There is also a “regional trust factor” between lawyers in certain regions of the country, the courts in which they practice and the service providers they use in a somewhat manual fashion today. When evaluating where eDiscovery is likely to evolve, I have concluded that there will always be a service component or professional services aspect to eDiscovery.

 Many of the services that are manual today will likely be automated however. I do believe that The Cloud will enable ubiquitous and scalable processing and analysis capabilities that will be delivered from a cloud infrastructure. The likely outcome is that they become provisioned from a platform that can let various service providers and Law firms use the different components of a hosted solution that makes sense for their clients or customers. This platform of Cloud-based services should introduce amazing efficiencies to the eDiscovery process overall. It should also allow users and service providers to select what services they need.

Please see Figure One for an illustration of a multi-tenant set of services that could be provisioned and accessed from Cloud Infrastructure. Such a system would allow small law firms to access scalable processing, OCR (Optical Character Recognition conversion of images to text) and analysis services “on-demand. Legal Service Providers (LSP’s) could also access this capacity over a high-speed network and “dial-up” as many CPU cores of capacity as they require to meet the timeframes of their customers. Their law firm clients may be dealing with them, and enjoying their project management and consulting expertise, but the LSP will enjoy the vast processing capability of the platform.

In this world, LSP’s could resell their consulting and project management expertise and rely on scalable cloud resources for the processing capacity that they lack with their point product approaches today. Along with the type of model, small or large law firms will be able to load the cloud with data and then have it analyzed. Reports explaining the attributes of the data would be the first “output” of such a system so that decisions around the case could be made intelligently with an eye toward cost containment. Eventual services could include document conversion, tagging and review. The customer could decide which of the platform features they require to satisfy their client or the needs of their business.

Figure One – Scalable Platform of Electronic Discovery Services

This basically allows a set of service providers and customers to share access to knowledge about the data that is germane to a case or matter. This step forward “standardizes” the processes around eDiscovery leveraging vast processing resources. Such a platform needs to scale to handle tens of Terabytes of processing and indexing a day. Amazingly scalable search and analytic capabilities are also implied requirements of this type of solution. Until now the architecture of eDiscovery products has lacked the scale and the “service scope” to provide this capability to a large number of simultaneous users.

The next step in the evolution toward a true elastic electronic discovery service involves sophistication around provisioning and monitoring these specific service components over the web and in an “on-demand” fashion. These services should be available in a way that allows partners to “tap into them” with standard API’s that enable them to provide customization. An example of this would be a regional service provider that could write their own customer care portal that leverages the hosted archiving, electronic discovery and legal review and processing functions of the cloud eDiscovery service. Using API’s (like Amazon does with EC2 for computing and S3 for storage) would allow LSP’s to customize their offerings and use the platform eDiscovery computing vendor as a “utility company” for very sophisticated services they could not get otherwise.

The important service components of an enabling platform such as this would involve and enable:

1. A customer self-service “on-ramp” where data can quickly and easily be introduced into a cloud service location
2. An initial processing analysis and reporting function that allows a customer to “self-assess” some content that relates to a given matter (“try before you buy”).
3. A subsequent deeper analysis and export function that removes irrelevant documents that do not need to go to linear attorney review; this is often referred to as “Early Case Assessment”.
4. An eventual linear attorney review function that can allow collaboration and group analysis of documents; including sampling and validation of tagging across various groups of reviewers.
5. Document export, Bates stamping and “production” services.

Other Aspects of the Solution: Local Intelligence

 An aspect of the service that will be required is related to the first item above: the “on ramp” or an intelligent local virtual appliance that can help a customer identify business records in a corporate environment. This is illustrated in Figure Two (below). Such a capability as a part of a “legal assessment service” could allow a corporate records manager or corporate IT staff member to identify and manage corporate records by identifying them locally and then placing them into the cloud legal retention service. This is a secondary evolution of cloud-based legal and records management services but one that will be very valuable.

Figure Two – Intelligent File Management and Cloud

Summary

Hosted cloud-based electronic discovery services will evolve due to their inherent efficiency. The services will evolve to be more turn-key than they are today but will likely retain a service component that itself will rely on cloud-based services. A full multi-tenant platform of capabilities that can enable a suite of business services will allow legal service providers, small and large law firms and even end user IT staff to have ready access to analysis and processing capabilities that they can only get with expensive self-provisioned software packages presently. The cloud will enable the efficient adoption of eDiscovery services at a scale that is unprecedented.

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