Strengthen Your eDiscovery Processes to Be Pandemic & Recession-Ready

As we continue to deal with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s increasingly clear that it will leave lasting effects on the global economy. Cost-cutting will be the name of the game for businesses worldwide, and credit unions will be no exception.

However, reducing costs doesn’t have to mean sacrificing quality services for your members, if you’re able to find ways to make your business processes more efficient. After all, every dollar spent fighting fires internally is a dollar taken away from investing in ways to make your business more effective.

Executives at credit unions should be taking a look at their most expensive processes and thinking about creative ways to reduce costs without decreasing effectiveness. I can guarantee that for many credit unions, litigation and eDiscovery costs are near the top of that list. Not only is eDiscovery an expensive process in and of itself, but in addition, many businesses lack a strategic and efficient procedure that can weather any storm. Instead, they attempt to devise a last-minute, reactive solution after a crisis has already hit, racking up unnecessary costs and causing extensive disruptions.

Keep running smoothly and on-budget by revising or defining your eDiscovery processes now, and prepare yourself for whatever is coming next by adopting these best practices.

Make eDiscovery a standard business process.

Continuity plans are essential for helping businesses weather emergencies or unexpected situations without causing a major disruption to their basic functions. This plan should include a proactive process for handling litigation and eDiscovery in a comprehensive and defensible way, rather than resorting to the panicked “fire drills” that often result from an unanticipated lawsuit.

With the unpredictability brought on by the current pandemic, this type of preparation is even more important. By establishing a regular process for secure data collection, you’ll save time and money in the long run and put yourself ahead of the game if and when a legal matter does take place.

Centralize and streamline processes.

In a time like this, when funds are low and margins are tight, your litigation process needs to be as streamlined as possible.

One way to do that is to centralize your eDiscovery under one roof. Rather than fielding out each piece of the process to separate specialists, find a single, end-to-end provider that can handle the whole matter for you.

A team of knowledgeable and experienced forensic data analysts using data processing and early analytics tools can remove large amounts of irrelevant data early in the process, greatly reducing the amount that has to be hosted and reviewed and resulting in dramatically lower eDiscovery costs. You may even want to consider using an automated document review system that will expedite the review process while maintaining accuracy and quality.

With an experienced team and the right tools, you’ll make the eDiscovery process a whole lot easier and less expensive.

Take potential limitations into account.

The COVID-19 crisis has reoriented the way many industries do business. Fortunately, many credit unions are equipped to continue providing services online and over the phone, curtailing only the in-person interactions with members. Similarly, eDiscovery is digitally focused and requires only minor adjustments to navigate around the remaining physical parts of the process.

For example, since face-to-face interaction is severely limited right now, it’s not practical to interview custodians in person, but well-written custodian questionnaires can be a very helpful alternative. Using questionnaires, a legal team can get most, if not all of the information they need from custodians at a far lower cost — reducing or even eliminating the need for costly in-person interviews.

Similarly, data collection sometimes requires traveling to where the data is stored, as well as getting access to the hardware that’s storing it. However, with the current travel limits and potential shipping delays, it’s much easier and less expensive to set up your data so that it can be collected remotely, if possible. Luckily, many systems today are cloud-based, so most of the data you’ll need should be fairly accessible from afar.

Plan for the bad and the ugly.

The realities of this pandemic and its economic effects are hard to bear, making them crucially important to plan for. When it comes to eDiscovery, you can use this time to be leveraging your technologies and workflows, and in doing so, lowering your total eDiscovery costs. It will save valuable resources during tough times, protect your membership, and ultimately, put your credit union in a better position for when the economy eventually snaps back.

Brian Schrader, Esq., is President/CEO of BIA, a provider of eDiscovery services and digital forensics based in New York City.