A report by OpenText suggests enterprise legal departments need to take control of the soaring cost of e-discovery – with AI, cloud and security all key technologies in the fight.
Serge Savchenko, vice president – legal technology at OpenText, explained that decision-makers need to be able to find the right information quickly, amid escalating risks and ever-expanding data volumes.
“The demand for speed is pushing legal departments and law firms to automate routine tasks and inject machine learning and AI into daily operations,” Savchenko said.
The Canadian vendor launched the report, the fourth annual survey of its kind, at Legaltech 2020 in conjunction with Ari Kaplan Advisors.
Key findings
*Legal operations teams are focused on controlling e-discovery costs by gaining transparency from law firms on discovery budgets and review efficiency, centralising e-discovery management, benchmarking success and partnering with managed review providers.
*Corporate legal teams are standardising their internal process for e-discovery, and even providing mandates to external counsel.
*77 percent contract directly with e-discovery vendors, 74 percent control which e-discovery vendors their outside counsel uses, and 71 percent have adopted a centralised approach to managing e-discovery data. A full 42 percent have adopted a single vendor model.
*The drive to improve e-discovery efficiency, spend and outcomes is fuelling AI spending and usage. 83 percent of respondents plan to increase spend in this area and 49 percent reported using predictive coding (also known as technology-assisted review) in the past year.
*69 percent of legal operations professionals say their law departments are standardising in the cloud.
*94 percent of respondents reported data security concerns around distributing electronically stored information to multiple discovery vendors and law firms.
Download the full OpenText survey of the needs of legal operations professionals here.
