For those that are caught out unawares, eDiscovery costs can quickly spiral out of control.

Particularly as litigations are growing more challenging.

Data sets continue to expand in volume, with more complex and varied formats, making manual tasks far more time-consuming and labour-intensive with each passing case.

This leaves internal resources thin. And as shrinking budgets mean many firms and in-house legal departments don’t have the option of increasing headcount, the only way to address these difficulties is to make their existing resources go further.

In short, legal professionals must do more with less.

By eliminating the burden of basic and highly repetitive tasks, and allowing the principles of intelligent human decisions to be significantly scaled up, automation is helping review teams to keep costs under control, reduce errors and risk, and enhance productivity.

Read on and discover just some of the ways automation is helping legal professionals to achieve more efficient, cost-effective and productive eDiscovery practices.

1. Eliminating irrelevant information

Early case assessment (ECA) is a vital process in developing an informed understanding of a litigation.

The data gathered during this process can help legal teams determine the amount of risk involved, and also guide their strategy and decision-making later down the line.

By automating certain tasks and processes in bulk, Analytics tools can allow discovery teams to cull and categorise large volumes of data in ways that are both efficient and effective.

There are tons of different tools out there, all with individual capabilities and purposes, but broadly speaking, Analytics serve to:-

• automate previously labour-intensive processes
• identify different sources of information that are conceptually or contextually similar, and group them accordingly
• weed out duplicates and other low-value documents
• structure and prioritise the review process.