The Challenge
One of the leading and most heavily litigated pharmaceutical companies in the world was confronted with the challenge of collecting electronically stored information (ESI) in response to numerous eDiscovery requests. Like many organizations in today’s technological world, the client found itself with increased data volumes, but decreased time and budget.
Internally, the client was struggling to support the legal demands of acquiring electronic evidence and their eDiscovery requests had increased due to mergers and acquisitions. Their need for a specialized partner became evident and the search began for a qualified company to support legal evidence collection on a full time basis. The client’s legal team responded to various litigation matters that required ESI collections from their employees’ data sources as well as structured data repositories. They were searching for an eDiscovery partner that was wellversed in data harvesting and forensic services and followed industry standard best practices when performing ESI collection. The client needed a partner who could supply a team that could integrate their services within the company’s infrastructure, both on-site and remotely, as well as work directly with other eDiscovery vendors (providing litigation support services post-ESI collection) and the company’s IT and forensics departments to support the legal demands for data collection.
The Solution
Epiq deployed a team of collection engineers, forensic specialists, and consultants, a project coordinator and a project manager to work on-site across all client facilities and remotely from nationwide Epiq locations, providing a managed evidence collection service. This service was designed to respond immediately to requests to harvest data. A project request could require tasks that ranged from a simple one custodian or data source collection to dozens of custodians with multiple data sources in various locations. Data collection for active litigation matters and the preservation of colleague data after they left the company were solutions that Epiq delivered to the client as part of ESI management.
Execution
The ability to follow industry best practices and perform processes that are repeatable and defensible led to a thorough documenting of all forensic and data collection procedures to ensure consistency. In addition to the daily collection activity, the client relied on the expertise of the team to help resolve complex technical issues or design a solution to improve the eDiscovery process, and a true partnership was formed.
The Results
The results of the managed evidence collection service continue to be a success. Prior to Epiq, the client found eDiscovery collections to be challenging and problematic. Through workflow process optimization and improved data collection methodologies, the Epiq collection service set a new performance standard that consistently meets or exceeds the client’s expectations, maintains a high quality rating and achieves service level agreements. The client’s cost savings were realized through a fixed yearly budget and the addition of services previously sourced outside the core collection service.