Lawyers and large corporations are always looking for ways to make their legal processes more efficient, which is in part why legal e-discovery services have skyrocketed in popularity of late. As such, organizations may find they need to upgrade their enterprise storage solution to account for the influx of sensitive data brought about by legal e-discovery.

The need for legal counsel will likely never go away, but how lawyers can better represent their clients is shifting thanks to technology. In particular, one of the biggest complaints often lobbied at lawyers is that while their services often command high prices – up to $900 an hour or more in major cities in Ontario, according to legal experts Erik Knutsen and Janet Walker – many of the hours billed can be related to more menial tasks such as recalling old files.

Instead of relying on manual workflows during the fact-finding process, legal professionals can instead utilize a legal e-discovery system. This way, a lawyer representing a major corporation can more quickly and easily recall documentation via the digital solution instead of digging through cabinets of paperwork, for example. Legal professionals benefit by not having to spend unnecessary amounts of time on more mundane tasks, and their clients can know that they are paying for quality representation rather than inefficient processes.

Overcoming legal e-discovery’s challenges
Although legal e-discovery presents many benefits, it is not without its flaws. In particular, such systems force organizations to dramatically reconsider their enterprise storage and data protection needs. After implementation, lawyers and companies need to shift their way of thinking away from paperwork and file cabinets to their IT systems, which will now be tasked with storing up to petabytes of data. In a recent article in Canadian Lawyer, legal professional Dera Levin wrote that legal e-discovery systems can quickly overwhelm a corporation’s IT infrastructure design if rising data volumes are not taken into account prior to adoption.

In addition, the enterprise storage system will likely be taxed with the variety of incoming data from legal e-discovery, Levin wrote. While many networks were built simply with numbers in mind, legal e-discovery must also take into account written text and other non-standardized forms of information, placing further strain on existing solutions. Plus, to make matters more complicated, a legal e-discovery system must place a high premium on data protection in order to remain compliant.

To address these concerns, Levin recommended that related organizations upgrade their technology and IT knowledge. While legacy solutions can make legal e-discovery seem like a poor investment, having a quality IT infrastructure design in place in conjunction with teams that know how to maximize such a configuration will help to make sure that the legal e-discovery solution yields the highest possible return on investment.

Organizations looking to upgrade their enterprise storage solution in light of legal e-discovery can partner with FlexITy, one of Canada’s largest IT consulting services firms, to have an IT infrastructure design that is more in line with their efficiency and data protection goals. By first gaining a thorough understanding of current business needs before implementing best-of-breed technology, FlexITy ensures that the system put in place is best suited for addressing the organization’s unique needs.

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