Choosing the right eDiscovery solution for your organization is complex. That’s why we created a new guide to help streamline the process and a method for ensuring you select the best-fit solution for your organization. 

Today’s legal climate is one of contrasts, where a gathering storm of regulatory scrutiny, compliance, litigation, and investigations is pitted against shrinking budgets and starkly diminished pools of legal and IT talent. 

Corporations and law firms are under intense pressure to stay ahead of the game despite these obstacles. Barring an influx of talent and funding, the most logical way forward is to adopt advanced legal technology solutions that offer an efficient way to tackle escalating eDiscovery needs, without requiring hand-holding from IT.

It all hinges on finding and selecting what’s going to work best for your team, your processes, and your organization. With limited time and budgets, organizations can’t afford to get the selection of a Legal Hold and eDiscovery platform even partly wrong. And busy professionals can’t afford to be overwhelmed by an overcomplicated procurement process. 

Making the best choice comes down to just two key elements: 

  1. Knowing the functionality and features that will be most useful to your organization 
  2. Asking the right questions to make sure they can be delivered by the solution and partner you choose

To accomplish this, organizations must conduct two distinct processes:

  1. An internal research phase 
  2. A thorough vendor/platform vetting process. 

You wouldn’t open a new job requisition without understanding exactly how that role would contribute to the organization. Nor would you fill the post just by looking at a candidate’s resume. You should take the same approach when choosing an eDiscovery platform and service provider partner. 

To ensure you’re investing in the best option, you first need to take a dive deep into the real needs and requests of your key stakeholders, and then interview potential vendors — not just about their technical capabilities, but also their past experience, approach/methodology, project team makeup, and communication processes. 

Addressing Your Real Needs

Your choice of platform, vendor, and technology needs to be shaped by the current level of eDiscovery maturity within your organization, your capabilities, gaps, pain points, and existing resources. Equally importantly, it should be guided by your anticipated eDiscovery needs going forward.

Understanding what makes an eDiscovery software right for you is complex. Lots of RFP checklists and guides exist, which can be helpful, but do come with several caveats. Some of the most widely used checklists haven’t been updated to cover key aspects such as the latest security needs, cloud technologies, or evolving privacy and compliance requirements

Most guides also skip over the actual procurement process. We believe this process is as critical to success as the evaluation factors themselves. 

Getting It Right From the Start

We recommend starting out with the declared intention of keeping the RFP tightly focused on the features and functionality that are most relevant to your needs and goals. It’s easy to be distracted by advanced eDiscovery software features and functions that aren’t relevant for your organization.

But you’ll also need to find a balance between allotting time for meaningful interactions with potential partners and streamlining the time and effort involved in the buying process. Key stakeholders are extremely busy, and it can be tempting to compress the investigation phases in favor of a generic RFI/RFP process. 

Avoid this at all costs

It may seem like a time-saver at the outset but will inevitably land you with solutions that have a limited lifecycle, require supplementary purchases, or create issues midway through the buying cycle.

Our guide helps you balance evaluation rigor with practical procurement steps — by clarifying the key processes, streamlining the steps required, providing updated selection criteria, and addressing points not covered in earlier checklists. Uniquely, our guide gives you a comprehensive pre-RFP preparation action list. It also incorporates our proprietary eDiscovery maturity evaluation model that will help you accurately establish your current baseline status and understand which technologies will enable you to reach the desired maturity level. 

Below is a summary of our key recommendations for the pre-procurement and RFI/RFP process:

Our eDiscovery guide won’t take all the time and effort out of the eDiscovery buying process or the eDiscovery technology vetting process. What it will do is streamline some of the key steps, ensure that you are evaluating platforms that can solve your unique problems, and help you select a partner to work and grow with you for the long term.

Download our eDiscovery Procurement Buyers’ Guide now to learn more and streamline your buying process today.

eDiscovery Procurement Guide

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Popular Posts