End-to-End eDiscovery Services for Law Firms Nationwide
E-DISCOVERY SUPPORT CONSULTING
Success in the litigation process depends on knowledge, experience and sound strategies; also having the best-organized information. If you can’t find and use the most important information, even the most skilled lawyer with the most exacting methods will find it difficult to succeed. During the past decade, litigation requirements have grown nearly as fast as has communication methods and devices.
As corporate CFOs and law firm billing partners know all too well; these two areas of growth have combined to make the review process an enormous expense. Simply stated, success in the courtroom will not, by itself, make a law firm successful; it’s also vital to earning that success efficiently. And for corporate balance sheets, substantial decreases in legal expenses can have a profound and positive impact on your projects bottom line.
Implementing our proven methods begins with a thorough consultation to understand your exact needs and timelines. We begin only when we have a comprehensive understanding of your case and the role you need EDDM to fill. A firm equipped and trained in the use of our methods will dramatically reduce costs for their clients, facilitate early and quick investigations of your data, and aid clients in making more informed decisions about the costs and benefits of a particular preservation and collection strategy. EDDM Project Managers will organize and reduce source material to help you manage thousands; often times tens of millions; of pages of information and data. We put the most important documents and data within immediate reach.
From collection through production and presentation, we utilize today’s top technology. Our project managers are proficient with virtually all litigation software applications; ensuring your project is consistent and accurate. Our founding premise was to strip out the unnecessary overhead and inefficiency inherent in traditional document management methods and created an all-inclusive process comprised of robust software, powerful hardware and managed by business process experts who can uniquely help our clients with the challenges they care about.
New: read our in-depth guide — The Complete eDiscovery Process: A Guide for Law Firms.
What eDiscovery Support Covers
Electronic discovery is the process of identifying, preserving, collecting, processing, reviewing and producing electronically stored information for litigation, regulatory response or internal investigation. In practice it spans email, file shares, collaboration platforms, mobile devices, databases and cloud applications — anywhere a business keeps records.
EDDM Consulting supports the full lifecycle:
- Collection — defensible capture of data from custodians and systems, with chain of custody documented from the outset
- Assessment — early case evaluation to understand what you actually have before decisions get expensive
- Processing — de-duplication, filtering and normalisation to reduce volume before review
- Review — managed document review, including technology-assisted workflows where the matter justifies them
- Production — delivery in the agreed format, with privilege logs and load files prepared to specification
Who We Work With
Much of the eDiscovery market is built for AmLaw 100 firms and enterprise matters. That leaves smaller firms paying enterprise rates for service they cannot get anyone on the phone about.
- Solo attorneys and small to mid-size firms handling their first or occasional eDiscovery matters
- Litigation teams that need overflow capacity on a specific case rather than a standing vendor relationship
- Corporate legal and compliance departments responding to subpoenas, regulatory requests or internal investigations
- Firms who want direct access to the people handling their data instead of an account manager
How We Work
1. Consultation and scoping. We start by understanding the matter, the deadlines and the likely data sources. Scope drives cost more than any other factor, so this conversation happens before anything is quoted.
2. Preservation and collection. Litigation holds are issued and documented. Data is collected from identified custodians and systems in a manner that preserves metadata and chain of custody.
3. Assessment. Before review begins, we look at what the collection actually contains — volume, date ranges, custodians, file types and duplication rates — so you can make informed decisions about narrowing scope.
4. Processing and culling. De-duplication, date and custodian filtering, and search term application reduce the population that reaches review. This is where the largest cost savings are available.
5. Review. Documents are reviewed for responsiveness and privilege. Where volume justifies it, technology-assisted review is used to prioritise, with sampling and validation to support defensibility.
6. Production. Responsive, non-privileged documents are produced in the agreed format, accompanied by privilege logs and load files.
How eDiscovery Pricing Works
eDiscovery is usually quoted per gigabyte, but the per-GB rate alone is a poor predictor of what a matter will cost. Spend is typically distributed across four areas:
- Collection — usually charged per custodian or per device
- Processing — charged per gigabyte ingested
- Hosting — a recurring monthly charge per gigabyte, for as long as the matter is live
- Review — almost always the largest single line item
Because hosting recurs and review scales with document count, the decisions that most affect total cost are made early: how broadly you collect, and how aggressively you cull before review. A lower per-GB rate on an over-collected dataset is a false economy.
We scope each matter individually and provide a written estimate before work begins.
Common Questions
Do we need to use a platform we already license?
We can work within a platform you already hold licences for, or host the matter ourselves. Which makes sense usually depends on how long the data needs to stay live.
What if the matter settles early?
Hosting is the cost that keeps running. We will tell you when data can be released or archived rather than leaving it accruing charges.
Is technology-assisted review defensible?
Courts have accepted TAR workflows for over a decade. Defensibility rests on process rather than the tool — a documented protocol, sampling, validation, and the ability to explain and reproduce results. It does not remove the need for attorney judgment.
Do you handle the documents once they are collected?
Yes — see document management for scanning, indexing and repository services. Contact us to scope a matter.