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The challenge

The solution

The outcome

Requirements

• - Define scope, goals, and legal/regulatory requirements
• - Identify key stakeholders, custodians, data owners, and outside counsel
• - Map data sources, systems, formats, and storage locations
• - Establish legal hold procedures and preservation protocols
• - Set collection criteria, methods, and chain-of-custody controls
• - Determine processing workflows, deduplication, filtering, and culling rules
• - Specify review platform, review standards, privilege workflow, and QC steps
• - Define search strategy, analytics, and relevance/TAR use cases
• - Create production standards, formats, redaction rules, and confidentiality controls
• - Address cross-border, privacy, and data transfer restrictions
• - Assign roles, responsibilities, timelines, and escalation paths
• - Set budgets, vendors, tools, and governance requirements
• - Implement documentation, audit trails, and defensibility reporting
• - Test the workflow with pilots/tabletop exercises and refine
• - Train users and maintain ongoing monitoring, updates, and lessons learned

Best practices

• 1. Define clear legal, compliance, and IT requirements before evaluating vendors.
• 2. Map your data sources, custodians, and file types across the organization.
• 3. Choose software that supports defensible legal hold and preservation workflows.
• 4. Verify strong ingestion, collection, and chain-of-custody capabilities.
• 5. Prioritize advanced search, filtering, deduplication, and email threading features.
• 6. Confirm support for common enterprise systems like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, and cloud storage.
• 7. Assess security controls, including encryption, access management, audit logs, and certifications.
• 8. Ensure the platform can scale for peak matter volumes and global data needs.
• 9. Evaluate review efficiency tools such as analytics, clustering, predictive coding, and AI-assisted prioritization.
• 10. Test export, production, and reporting options for litigation and regulatory needs.
• 11. Check whether the vendor offers defensible workflows aligned with legal standards and court expectations.
• 12. Review implementation time, training needs, and ease of administration for internal teams.
• 13. Compare total cost of ownership, including licensing, storage, support, and services.
• 14. Validate vendor support quality, SLAs, and experience with B2B organizations.
• 15. Run a pilot or proof of concept using real-world use cases before committing.