Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Introduction
March 10, 2011
If you work in a law firm or a corporate legal department, there will be times when you turn to a service provider to help with handling discovery materials – regardless of the technology and staff resources that you have. You might look to a service provider to handle work that your department doesn’t do. Or maybe your own resources are tied up and you just need more capacity.
Very often, service providers become key members of the litigation team, and critical to the team’s success. There is, however, a lot that can go wrong – just with the slightest miscommunication. It is, therefore, important that you have an effective plan in place for engaging service providers when you need help, for working effectively with service provider project staff, and for seamlessly incorporating the work product into the case workflow.
There are dozens – if not hundreds – of service providers to choose from for any given task on any given case. Where do you start? How do you find the one that’s right for your case? How do you communicate effectively with that service provider? How do you ensure high quality work, that’s delivered on time and within budget? We’ll be answering all of these questions in this blog series. We’re going to cover:
- Evaluating and Selecting a Service Provider
- Preventing Problems and Monitoring Work
- Establishing and Managing a Preferred Service Provider Program in Your Firm
- Types of Service Providers and Questions to Ask Each Type
In the next post in this series, we’ll start with what you should be looking for when you select a service provider.
What has been your experience with service provider work? Do you have good or bad experiences you can tell us about? Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.
