Last week, I co-hosted a webinar called “How to Turn eDiscovery Cost into eDiscovery Profit,” all about how to bring your eDiscovery into your Litigation Support department and create a profit center for your law firm. It’s a topic I’m passionate about because I’ve done it (successfully) before. And I know the impact it can have, not just on the bottom line, but on how Litigation Support is perceived within the firm. 

Last month, I attended a session titled “Uniquely LLM: How Generative AI is Transforming eDiscovery”. While the event centered on large language models (LLMs), what stood out most was what the technology means for the future of document review, and more importantly, how we lead and deliver that work in my own job.

At this point I think we can all agree that generative AI (GenAI) has moved beyond being a potential buzzword or a trend, but is actually shaping industries. And eDiscovery is no exception. In our industry, it is shaping how we approach review, analysis and production of electronically stored information (ESI). 

If you’ve ever stood up to a bully in the schoolyard, you probably remember an important lesson: once you start bending to keep the peace, you’ll never get fair play again.

When my partners and I founded Proteus, we made a promise to ourselves that we would take our decades of combined litigation experience and use it to serve our clients with honesty, flexibility, and integrity.

It’s a familiar scene: the eDiscovery lead launches into a deep dive on deduplication metrics for an upcoming trial, while your eyes scan the room for a quiet escape. Or flip it – you’re trying to outline a tight trial timeline and get no reaction from your eDiscovery vendor – because the dataset is three terabytes, and no one's talked budget yet.

Let’s get one thing straight: paralegals are the glue that holds litigation together. As a paralegal, you know you are typically the first to know when discovery deadlines are looming and the last to leave when a production goes out the door. So let’s talk about eDiscovery in a way that gives you the confidence to own your role in it.

In Part 1 of this series, we laid the groundwork for why eDiscovery matters. Now it’s time to get practical. Because once you’ve preserved the data, the real adventure begins.

If you work in litigation and haven’t dealt with eDiscovery yet, you either bill in a parallel universe or you’ve been very, very lucky. However, as digital data continues to multiply, even the smallest matters now involve some form of electronically stored information (ESI).

We recently partnered with EDRM for a webinar titled “How to Talk to Your Litigators About eDiscovery”, where I co-presented with Francesca Morency, a litigator and Partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. We dug into what litigators really care about when eDiscovery comes up - and how Litigation Support and eDiscovery professionals can meet those needs without diving so deep into technical details that litigators tune out.