If you’ve never embarked on eDiscovery before, the prospect can be daunting.

You may be in the earlier years of your practice, or perhaps you’ve only handled smaller files that had maybe a few dozen documents to review. All of the sudden you’ve landed a big fish – a large-scale litigation file that could be lucrative for both your firm and your client. You’re ready to dive in…until you realize the volume of evidence is massive.

Your client has several key stakeholders, all of whom had been involved for years before litigation commenced. As you start tabulating the evidence that you’ll need to produce, you realize how quickly you’re in over your head. Between inboxes, filing cabinets, cell phones, recordings, and other pieces – there may be tens of thousands of pieces of evidence to review, and there’s no way that your bootstrapped firm can handle that on your own.

Not sure where to go next? That’s where we come in.

Dollars and Sense

One of the things that we pride ourselves in at Everest Discovery is offering free consultations. It’s important to sit down with our clients early and lay out a road map, because for many this may be their first time embarking on a discovery project of this size, and they’re genuinely not sure what’s involved.

The first reality to deal with is the cost of doing things right.

If you’re working with a volume of documents beyond what you can personally handle, then it’s imperative to bring in the right third-party partner for your review. However, getting it right is not cheap. Depending on the volume of documents, the number of custodians, and the production deadlines imposed by opposing counsel, the costs can be significant.

When we meet with a new client, we’ll help them weigh the costs of proper due diligence review against the potential recovery of a matter. It may be that while a matter is tempting to take on, the high costs of discovery could outweigh any potential profit, and thus too great a financial risk to the firm.

Failing to conduct proper review can come at great peril to the results of a case. Producing a privileged document that should never have been made public, or failing to properly examine a key one, can be detrimental to the outcome of a case. Similarly, manually reviewing tens or even hundreds of thousands of documents manually can eat up hours of billable time that the firm can ill-afford. A trusted partner is often the best way to handle things correctly.

One of the greatest misconceptions is that AI has drastically reduced the costs of proper discovery. While AI is able to automate some tasks, we are still several years away from being able to trust its review calls implicitly, or to use it without much human intervention. AI may help reduce a portion of the workload, but costs remain in programming, maintenance, and of course due diligence.

The Importance of Client Education

While we work with firms that may be newer to eDiscovery, we also work with attorneys who have more experience, and ultimately both face the same challenge. Even if the attorney understands the process well, they may be required to educate a client who has never been through discoveries before, and has no idea what to expect.

That process can certainly raise some eyebrows! If you’re not familiar with the litigation process or its requirements, you may be intimidated by someone telling you to safely preserve your smartphone, or not to touch anything in the deepest recesses of your inbox. If you don’t even remember what’s there, what on Earth is someone else going to find?

We help our clients educate their clients to have those difficult conversations. This often helps break down some of those difficult budget discussions, so that parties can understand how their resources are being spent, and what steps may be coming next in the process.

No One Likes a Surprise

Attorneys know that there are few things worse in a file than an unexpected surprise. An 11th hour ‘smoking gun’ can be great if it supports your case, but disastrous if it means a complete pivot of your litigation strategy. Ensuring that key documents are found on time and dealt with properly can be instrumental in avoiding these last minute ‘surprises.’

We keep the lines of communication open with our clients so that you can do the same with yours. Practical conversations about costs, timelines, and next steps ensure that those surprises are few and far between, and don’t throw the entire case off course.

Want to learn more about how we can help with your case? Set up a time to chat with one of our experts.

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If you think that AI is going to be the magic bullet that solves all of the challenges in your firm, then we have some terrible news.

Yes, AI is changing many aspects of our daily lives, and law is no exception. While we’ve been mechanizing things for centuries, AI can work at remarkable speed, but the quality of its output still depends heavily on the instructions, information, and oversight provided by humans. An increasing number of professionals are using it as the world’s most powerful assistant.

But think about assistants that you’ve had challenges with in the past. Yes, they’ve been hungry and eager to learn. If you ask them to go and grab something, they’ll run out the door at lightning speed in order to get you what you want. Yet you also know the frustration that can come when they return with the wrong thing – whether that’s the wrong coffee order, the wrong book from the shelf, or the wrong precedent case. It’s not their fault because they didn’t know any better, but the end result is the same.

AI is similar and often used as that hungry assistant. The challenge is that AI still doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. If you’ve heard of hallucinations in the legal context, that’s essentially when the system is making up answers believing they’re correct instead of admitting that it doesn’t know. If a human assistant did that for you, they would be fired immediately. So why are we giving AI such a free pass?

The Human Element

There may be great uses for AI within your practice. However, if you think that it will quickly replace the humans you’ve hired, you may want to reconsider your position.

To be used effectively, AI still requires a great deal of human training and intervention. At the outset, you’ll need to make sure your staff is trained on how to appropriately use AI. Setting out a firm policy can help educate staff on what usage is okay, and what usage is not. For example, AI may be helpful for some research, but unsupervised case law research can lead it to hallucinate cases.

Which leads to one of the main stipulations – AI needs to be carefully checked by knowledgeable humans. You’ve likely seen the news stories of lawyers who are penalized severely in court for their over-reliance on AI-suggested cases that turned out not to be real cases at all. Without safeguards, AI can fabricate an entire precedent-setting decision, and then encourage reliance on that very fabrication.

In the discovery space, AI needs careful supervision to ensure that it’s making the correct privilege calls. It can be a helpful tool for completing and sorting privilege logs, but privilege can be tricky. Overly cautious redactions may raise the eyebrows of opposing counsel, and sloppy redaction practices that are not carefully checked may reveal things detrimental to your position.

Decisions, Decisions

There is no question that AI is changing the legal landscape yet remember that AI is not making decisions. Those ultimately come down to humans, and our own will. AI may select a document for inclusion, but ultimately the decision whether or not to follow that call or to rule against it and include a document for production is ours.

The same can be said in multiple aspects of legal practice. AI is simply following our commands, but it does not in itself make any actual decisions. The practice of law involves making decisions routinely, on a rapid-fire basis. Deciding whether or not to ask a question, how to follow-up on a piece of evidence, what a witness’ body language can mean – those are all human points of analysis that AI will not take away anytime soon.

If you’re wondering where to begin, start small. Identify one repetitive, low-risk workflow, establish clear policies and guardrails, keep knowledgeable humans involved, and measure the results before expanding AI into additional areas of your practice.

Want to learn more about how we’re incorporating AI here at Everest? Visit our AI page to learn more.

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What’s stopping you from taking on a big fish client? Not a decent size fish, but a massive, multi-national, Fortune 500-level file?

If you have those clients already, fantastic, but if you don’t, it’s likely been a lack of resources that’s limited your capacity. It’s either a lack of attorneys, or a lack of admin support, or a simple lack of time that’s put those clients out of reach.

What AI has done is change the game. With the birth of agentic AI, imagine being able to significantly increase the capacity of your existing team without necessarily adding headcount. You could suddenly have triple the capacity to research, draft memos and pleadings, help with correspondence, and do the jobs that can make a file crawl.

A huge amount of evidence would traditionally require significant time and resources to review. AI can help accelerate the process. AI implementations can speed up the most tedious parts of that process, whether by helping with privilege logs in document review or making predictive calls about relevance based on a sample set. Review that may have once taken months can potentially be completed in a fraction of the time.

Welcome to the world of legal AI.

There’s an Agent for That

There are common misconceptions about AI implementation, especially within the legal world. No, you shouldn’t be plugging sensitive data into a public AI tool without understanding its privacy, security, and data-handling safeguards, and you certainly shouldn’t be running to court with the first answer it provides. That’s not an effective use of AI, especially within the legal sphere.

What you’re likely to do instead is build an agent. Think of an AI agent as a computerized member of your team. If you’re able to provide them with a job description and a clear scope of work, they’re often able to work at a speed and rate of efficiency that humans never previously thought possible.

Think back to the days when you were a young lawyer and you were sent to the law library to do research. Unless you were a wunderkind, you probably spent hours combing through the stacks looking for the exact book that you needed. Now, you can have an agent that can quickly search and analyze the legal resources and information it has been given access to.

If you ask your AI agent a research question, it can search the resources it has access to and surface potentially relevant information within minutes. It’s built to use natural language, so it will come up with what it thinks is the most appropriate answer. You as the end user can review, and if it’s not quite right, you can send it back into the field. It may take a few tries, but the speed cannot be beat.

The New Addition to Document Review

We’re often asked how AI is going to change the game when it comes to eDiscovery. The truth is that we’re still in the earliest days of seeing what potential AI holds, and the technology will continue to improve the further it integrates. However, we’re already getting an early sense of what’s possible.

The first is the power of prediction. AI has the capacity to work with a sample set of documents where relevancy and privilege have been determined and then extrapolate that knowledge to a much larger set of documents. When thousands of documents may be identical or nearly identical to others, this can mean significant time savings for your human staff to continue working on litigation strategy.

AI can also be helpful in the administrative side of review. Privilege logs can be tedious, but a well-trained algorithm can help sort out some of the logistical clean-up. Again, this work may not be perfect from the first go-around, and inadvertently producing privileged documents can be detrimental to your case. Close human supervision is the best accompaniment to any AI process.

Final Thoughts

We’re still in the nascent days of AI, and at Everest we are still investigating its full range of capabilities. We have, however, worked with clients who have wanted to go all in, and we understand it does have significant potential.

Want to learn more about how AI can impact your review process? Watch our latest video series to hear from our in-house eDiscovery experts.

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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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