Budget restrictions and personnel reductions obligate legal departments to maximize efficiencies for time spent on managing the discovery stage of litigation.  Your litigation readiness team may be internally staffed by representatives from Legal, IT, HR and Compliance, or it may be enhanced for high risk litigation matters with representatives from outside counsel and trusted service providers.  Whatever the configuration of the team members, efficiencies will be maximized by taking the time to diagram the work flow process.

A discovery work flow process diagram will memorialize all decision points; from the scope of the data collection (electronic and paper) to the management of the document review process. The process will be standardized, although the decisions taken will vary with each investigation or litigated case.  Budgeting and resource allocation can then be tied to the stages of the work flow process.  As the result of having a standardized process, business disruptions are minimized; there should be no more “fire drills”.

Having a visual diagram of the decision points and work flow process is an excellent communication tool for explaining the discovery process to corporate management, business units and outside counsel. Litigation progress reports and budgets can be tied to the workflow diagram to improve accountability.  A CEO I reported to during my in-house career was constantly frustrated by what he perceived as the lack of accountability for the dollars spent in litigation management.  Having in hand the strategic litigation plan and the work flow process at the inception of a matter, and re-visiting it periodically, helped to ease that frustration.       

Discovery activities in large, complex litigation matters are often concurrent and overlapping – data collection, data sampling, interviewing custodians, reviewing data for responsiveness and privilege – all have to be managed simultaneously.  While the actual work flow may not be linear in reality, the same process will be followed for each repeated stage of the work flow. Documenting the decisions as they are made (e.g. which data sources, which custodians, whether to opt for hosted managed document review) increases the defensibility of your actions to the court or investigative agency. Simply demonstrating that you have a uniform process puts you ahead of the curve in avoiding accusations of spoliation.

Discovery project management should be the norm in every corporation whether the tasks are performed by in-house or outside counsel, together with their colleagues in other disciplines.  Managing your discovery work flow process enables corporations to: 1) identify and control decision points, 2) monitor accountability, budgets and resource allocation throughout the discovery stage, and 3) track document review progress and production.

See an example of a Discovery Project Map and Workflow Process at www.applieddiscovery.com