If you’ve been in law for long enough, you probably remember rooms full of boxes, piles of color-coded tabs, and the headache of trying to keep everything organized to help tell your story. The team would be scrambling until all hours of the night trying to put documents, and even whole boxes, together to meet production demands.

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, has made the process exponentially simpler, but it is not without its own challenges. While documents are easier than ever to digitize, a virtual workplace can mean thousands or tens of thousands of documents to sort through, each with different formats, file sizes, and stored in various places.

Want to know what to watch for in your discovery process?

Here are a few ways the process can go wrong and how to mitigate them:

An Overeager Client

It’s fantastic that your client is eager to help with the discovery process because their participation is necessary, but you’ll need to be the one to channel that energy. An overeager client who starts collecting documents with no rhyme or reason is bound to collect too much, and often from the wrong locations.

Managing an eager client means having a clear sense of their role in expediting the discovery process. Clear communication about what is needed and when can help harness that energy and lead to a better overall collection strategy.

Surprise Storehouses

Remember that bankers’ box you found hiding on the other side of a filing cabinet the night before everything was due? Now it’s the inbox that somebody hadn’t checked in a while, or the USB flash drive that someone found in a desk drawer and didn’t think was important. Surprise data storehouses are inevitable sometimes, but a good plan can help avoid those all-nighters.

Work with your client to create a clear checklist of all the places where relevant documents and data might be. These often go well beyond inboxes and desktop folders. They may be in old file folders, on company cell phones, in internal group chats, or in countless other places. Knowing where to look can make it much easier to find what you need and filter out what you don’t.

An Unclear Hold Order

Have your clients ever dealt with hold orders to prevent spoliation? If they haven’t, they may not even know what those words mean. The last thing you want is a client starting to panic and haphazardly deleting documents or data they don’t think are necessary (when in fact they are).

Explaining those hold orders early can help ensure nothing is deleted inadvertently or wiped clean. There may be thousands of irrelevant documents after all, but you’ll never truly know until you begin analyzing what you’re working with.

No Delivery Process

Your client is actively collecting documents and finding things of interest, and they’re reporting back frequently – great! Then what? How are you assembling these documents and producing them for discovery? You may not need to courier dozens of boxes, but you need to figure out a digital presentation format that makes sense.

Part of an efficient battle plan means seeing the finish line. Thinking ahead allows you to provide clients with clear instructions on formatting, file types, redactions, etc. With third-party support from an eDiscovery vendor, that extra clarity can make the process smoother, and ideally save the client time and budget.

An Indefensible Strategy

What happens if the other side challenges your collection process? Document production can be a little bit like math class – getting the right answer is good, but it’s just as important to be able to show your work. If you can’t, you risk a challenge that you have something to hide, or that you haven’t produced everything relevant.

Keep a clear log of what you’ve done and why, and what your criteria has been for determining relevance and privilege. Your privilege logs, for example, can be instrumental in showing your methodology and erasing any doubt that you’ve been producing the right information.

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Don’t let your discovery go off the rails due to poor planning. There are enough moving pieces involved to complicate the process, but you can also minimize those pain points wherever possible.

Want to know more? Our comprehensive discovery checklist covers potential red flags in eDiscovery and the steps to take to avoid them.

Download the Early Discovery Checklist

Everest Discovery is here to help every step of the way. With more than 35 years of experience, we take a practical approach to eDiscovery focused on security, defensibility and simplicity. We’ll work with you to build a process that makes sense and lets you focus on the case at hand.

When discovery decisions matter, having an experience partner can make all the difference.

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