Do you have your kid’s pediatrician fix the carburetor on your 1975 AMC Gremlin?
Do you have your kid’s pediatrician fix the carburetor on your 1975 AMC Gremlin? God no! Same rings true for having your outside law firm collect and process data from your company’s Oracle cluster, Linux fileservers, Subversion repository or Domino server. Technology has moved at a breathtaking speed in recent years, especially with the advent of mobile devices, cloud computing and eDiscovery.
Thank goodness for outsourcing;
Whether it be cloud computing, business intelligence, enterprise mobility or predictive coding, business owners should strongly consider outsourcing these services to firms that specialize in the solutions. This is especially true in the world of eDiscovery, where the associated software is incredibly complicated with legal implications abound.
The Legal Intelligencer spoke to this point in a recent story, trying to explain whether law firms should purchase and upgrade these software products on their own or outsource the responsibilities to eDiscovery professionals altogether. According to the source, the expensive nature of hiring well-trained staff members in an internal department, as well as the costs of constantly buying new software as it comes out, is leading many law firms to outsource litigation services entirely.
“”The big mistake law firms make is that they don’t understand the complexity of e-discovery,”” Ralph Losey, a partner at the employment law firm Jackson Lewis, told the Legal Intelligencer. “”There’s such confusion and muddiness. Law firms should do what they are supposed to do and the only thing they have a license to do, honestly. That is legal services.””
More benefits of third-party solution providers;
Many law firms fall into a lull where they will mix and match their internal practices with outsourcing, especially regarding eDiscovery-related tasks like electronically stored information (ESI) management, data protection, information governance and predictive coding, when necessary. Having a fragmented approach with these tasks can lead to much higher costs, and worse, far more confusing scenarios with legal implications.
Outsourcing all of these responsibilities to a reliable litigation solutions provider can curb the issues associated with having either too few, or too many cooks in the kitchen. This will keep costs down and ensure the most advanced software is in use at all times.”