eTERA Consulting has expanded its eDiscovery program by adding managed services for its law firm clients. The company offers the Opti1mum One end-to-end eDiscovery program as well as litigation consulting services.
The program has been expanded to provide scalable managed services for eDiscovery and litigation support. The solutions offer a variety of benefits to law firms, including cost control, risk reduction, efficiencies and data security.
“As a former law firm technology officer, I know firsthand the value of managed services; budget reduction, enhanced data security and a robust IT infrastructure,” said Maria Herrera, global managing director of information and technology operations at eTERA.
“The attractiveness of managed services is having the ability to leverage leading technologies without any capital investments and enhancing in-house capabilities without enormous operational costs,” added Todd Haley, vice president of business intelligence. “As eTERA’s Chief Security Officer, I also understand how managed services can address the data security concerns of law firm CTOs that were reported in the recent 2013 AM Law Technology Survey.”
That survey shows that 86 percent of law firms queried are even more concerned about security threats now than they were two years ago. Fears are largely driven by stricter regulatory requirements, more sophisticated cyber-criminal techniques and having more security-conscious clients. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, however, is being welcomed in the market and MDM systems have made it standard operating procedure in many firms.
Managed services can address a lot of those concerns, and managed eDiscovery is a logical solution for the legal community. The eDiscovery market is booming in general, with the Radicati Group predicting it will rise from $976 million last year to $2.35 billion by 2016. Cloud-based eDiscovery will be an important part of that growth.
“In comparison to their on-premises based counterparts, cloud-based eDiscovery services enable customers to save costs on the transfer of data throughout all stages of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) while also eliminating much of the back-end management and maintenance duties typically associated with an on-premises solution,” commented Radicati.
An American Bar Association article on the cost savings of cloud-based eDiscovery shows cloud solutions produced a savings of 36 percent, or around $2.3 million over enterprise software. And that’s a conservative estimate. According to a three-year analysis of total costs, a cloud solution came in at $4 million while an in-house platform totaled $6.3 million. Those numbers present a pretty compelling case for law firms to take a closer look at managed eDiscovery services.
Edited by
Ryan Sartor
