The Advantages of Early

Guidance Software There's a clear advantage in doing things early. For example, if you wake up early, you can beat rush-hour traffic. Starting a project early means you're less likely to be short on time to finish it. The same applies to electronic discovery. The earlier you can get your hands, and head, wrapped around your corpus of data, the better you can anticipate costs, allocate resources, prepare to negotiate with opposing counsel, make case-strategy decisions and minimize overall expenses.

But early case assessment (ECA), as this technique is called, wasn't always possible. In e-discovery's infancy, legal professionals were grateful just to have a roadmap that could describe the complex process needed to get from document collection to production. The EDRM provided a fairly linear path that discovery professionals could travel down to reliably and defensibly respond to discovery requests.

But as costs associated with e-discovery began to escalate, a new concern arose. No longer was the challenge merely to produce responsive, non-privileged documents from a collection of potentially millions of files; now the challenge was to produce responsive, non-privileged documents in the most cost-effective manner possible.

Because processing and reviewing documents equates to large increases in overall e-discovery costs, the obvious solution is to reduce the amount of information that needs to be processed and reviewed. However, this means that documents must be siphoned out during collection or, ideally, before collection. Just a couple years ago, such a notion would have seemed impossible. How could legal professionals derive usable insights without actually taking the time to collect, process and review the data?

Today, ECA presents a solution to this problem. ECA allows legal personnel and discovery professionals to reap insightful metrics from largely unsorted, unprocessed collections of data. With these insights, the legal team can identify key custodians and issue legal hold notices, develop keyword lists, test and perfect search criteria, identify relevant data sources and formulate a strong case strategy. Plus, by distinguishing percentages of potentially responsive data versus likely non-responsive data, professionals can surmise overall costs before embarking on a potentially expensive discovery process.

The most effective ECA solutions allow professionals to deploy pre-collection analytics to get data insights as early in the discovery process as possible, even before collection takes place. In addition, these solutions should allow analysis and first-past review to take place at any point in the EDRM, which helps to cull down data sets and reduce outside review costs. By combining these two functions—pre-collection analytics and flexible analysis and first-pass review—legal professionals can expedite the discovery process and greatly reduce overall e-discovery costs.

Learn more about how you can harness the power of ECA with EnCase® eDiscovery (PDF).

Learn more about EnCase® eDiscovery.