Leveraging Metrics to Drive Efficiency in E-Discovery

Legal organizations are always seeking ways to reduce their e-discovery spend, manage e-discovery processes more efficiently and accurately forecast their legal budgets. Metrics play a significant role in achieving those goals.

Whether you call them “metrics”, “key performance indicators” (KPIs) or some other name, when metrics are leveraged correctly, they can provide valuable intelligence into what works best at a company so that strategic changes can be implemented quickly and effectively. For instance, metrics might reveal how long it takes for a project from start to finish, or how much energy is used throughout the workflow process. This kind of insight allows businesses to make informed decisions about which steps need to be improved or eliminated to ensure greater efficiency.

Applying Metrics to E-Discovery Workflows

Metrics and reporting play a vital role in efficiency and effectiveness in e-discovery workflows. With metrics-driven insights, organizations can better understand how long it takes to complete each task within an e-discovery workflow, identify bottlenecks that slow down the process and increase costs, and measure performance against established benchmarks.

Reporting and documentation help legal teams optimize processes for maximum efficiency while keeping them on task. Metrics also help you estimate when e-discovery tasks will be completed so that you can adjust as needed to stay on schedule to meet deadlines.

Achieving the “where” and “when” for e-discovery projects is more challenging today than in the past. Across the world, data has grown from 2 zettabytes (which is 2 trillion gigabytes) in 2010 to 120 zettabytes today – an increase of 60 times in just 13 years. When you consider the variety of discoverable data sources – including mobile devices, enterprise cloud solutions, and collaboration apps – the ability to leverage metrics to streamline processes is more important than ever.

Important Metrics and Documentation for E-Discovery Projects

There are three categories of metrics and documentation that can help keep your e-discovery team on track, efficient, and effective:

• Case Information: If organizations only had one matter, it would be easy to track. However, for most organizations that have multiple matters, it is important to be able to track information that includes the matter name and status, key details about the client and law firm, contact information, and even any regional restrictions to keep in mind.
• Case Documentation: During the life of a case a lot can happen – everything from iterative collections and searching to turnover of project personnel. Having case documentation in a centralized, easy to access location enables the team to stay on point and get new team members up to speed quickly.
• Business Intelligence: These are the detailed metrics associated with the workflow itself, which includes data on everything from processing to production, but also financials to ensure the project remains on budget. These metrics could make the difference between on-time, on-budget and having to explain to the client (or worse, the court) what went wrong.

Key Feature Criteria for E-Discovery Metrics Tracking

When looking for an e-discovery solution, here are seven of the most important feature criteria to consider for metrics tracking and reporting:

• Real-Time Access: e-discovery projects move fast and making decisions based on yesterday’s numbers could prove costly. It is important for an e-discovery metrics solution to provide access to real time information to support timely decision making.
• Customizable Dashboards: Metrics are as varied as the people who use them. Dashboards are a great way to track important metrics at a glance, but not everybody is focused on the same metrics. Dashboards need to be customizable to support the needs of each user.
• Easy to Use: Your team already has plenty to learn to effectively support your e-discovery project. If the software that tracks e-discovery metrics is difficult to grasp, your team will not use it.
• Visualization: A picture is worth a thousand words and at least as many numbers. A robust e-discovery metrics solution needs to provide numerous visualizations to enable “at a glance” status communication.
• Cross-Matter Reporting: As noted above, an e-discovery metrics solution must provide cross-matter reporting capabilities. Not only will that enable you to manage multiple projects more effectively, it will enable you to learn from previous projects to implement improvements going forward.
• Centralized Reporting and Documentation: The data needs to reside in one centrally located repository so that it can be accessed by any team members that need to use it.
• Extendable: The e-discovery metrics solution should support the ability to download the data into a business intelligence platform such as Microsoft’s Power BI to extend the reporting and analysis capabilities even further.

Data-driven insights provided by metrics empowers your team to deliver projects on-time and on-budget, while you gain the ability to forecast accurately and control your legal spend. KLDiscovery’s Client Portal solution provides all these benefits and more.

Visit KLDiscovery’s website to learn more about Client Portal, see a video of the features in action, and schedule a complimentary demonstration.

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