Bridging the Gap Between Legal and Technology Communication During Complex eDiscovery Matters

By: Andrew Dorsey, Senior Project Manager

eDiscovery matters require expertise from both the legal and technical fields, two disciplines that can often speak different languages, leaving the potential for communication gaps and disjointed work products. Moreover, experts in forensics, data services, hosting platforms, and managed review must precisely navigate client specifications in order to meet fast-paced and time-sensitive deadlines. While it may take a team of several talents to properly tackle a complex matter, the matter itself is a singular entity and clients need information in a singular voice.

There are some best practices you can follow to help streamline your project management efforts and ensure your team is performing like a highly efficient pit crew, coordinating their efforts, and producing the best communication and product for the client.

Here are three strategies to help achieve your desired results:

• Small project teams. Having a small team of three to five project managers simplifies the communication process, enables greater accountability, and facilitates a more cohesive voice within a project. Spreading your team members across multiple time zones provides consistent solutions delivery for clients at all hours.
  
• Efficient ticketing process. Many companies rely on email and spreadsheets to track the progress of a matter, an antiquated practice that often results in tasks and communication falling through the cracks. By utilizing technology – namely a ticketing system – to manage the requests, you can streamline your efforts. A well-placed system provides quality control and allows client requests to be allocated to a team of technical resources. By having a pool of shared technical resources, tasks that would otherwise tie up a primary point of contact can be assigned and executed by the next available resources on the team. A ticketing system also allows for workload balancing and provides additional support for cases in more active phases of the litigation lifecycle than others.
  
• Share information by setting up a shared knowledge library. There’s nothing worse, and more time consuming than having to reinvent the wheel repeatedly. Project management teams can avoid that redundancy by maintaining a centralized shared information database where they disseminate specialized project solutions.

A side effect of having small project management teams is that knowledge can get siloed so that one team’s solution is not available to another team facing a similar problem. To help share those solutions, project managers should meet regularly and post newly gained information to the company’s shared location.

By customizing tools and resources around project needs, eDiscovery project managers can more effectively balance workloads and share operations resources, working like a well-oiled machine to provide clients with accurate, timely deliverables and high-quality consultation, presented as one coherent voice.