Best Practices Law Department

Law departments have faced mounting pressures to squeeze the highest efficiencies from their budgets. These budget constraints impact everyday decisions. From forensics to information governance, and everything in between, it is imperative to leverage the best tools and practices. Turning to a third-party consultant can make all the difference in best leveraging your team’s workflows.

Discovery

High-level discovery is the direct result of efficient workflows. Operating at this level is imperative, as discovery is characterized as the need to methodically identify, manage, and produce data posthaste. This must be done while simultaneously maintaining the security of privileged information and the chain-of-custody of all information.

In order to achieve this level of proficiency, measures to improve processes and tools should be introduced. Understanding the best tools and processes to introduce here can be a challenge. Continuous development of your discovery program is a must to stay at the top of the game. You must consider the infrastructure, multidisciplinary client support, pricing, security, and innovation that surround the discovery process.

Forensics

Gaining access to experts to assist in data acquisition, analysis, and recovery across the more widely used data types, platforms, and devices can pose difficulties. In dealing with the forensics process, there are five considerations organizations should keep in mind:

  1. As many organizations operate on an international scale, many have run into trouble balancing their global reach with local expertise. Understanding varying jurisdictional requirements and how to best utilize resources directly affects the overall process efficiency.
  2. It is imperative to understand how to best implement the latest technology. This must be forensically sound and verifiable. Furthermore, the corresponding techniques must be sound in order to ensure smooth sailing.
  3. The overall approach must be in concordance with all current rules and regulations. This all depends on the jurisdiction, but regardless, organizations cannot afford ignorance on legal requirements.
  4. Transparency in communication between consultants and the in-house team is vital. Extensive collaboration ensures that no stone is left unturned in the forensics process.
  5. Having a large data set from which to analyze solutions makes a huge difference. A team with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets provides the best approaches and solutions.

Law Department Operations

To state the obvious, a law department of fifteen is going to differ from a department of 100. Whether there are differences in responsibilities, budget, training, or approach to technology; a one-size-fits-all consulting approach will absolutely not suffice here. In order to achieve maximum ROI, departments must consider:

  1. How to best implement technology in dealing with each individual process.
  2. How to keep stakeholders educated and in the loop while working diligently with internal and external teams.
  3. Which areas may be identified as operating at peak efficiency, and which may not.
  4. Which may be the best solution to optimize department performance.
  5. How to benchmark effectively.
  6. How to implement technology to analyze efficiencies in both time and spend.

Information Governance

Reducing cost directly correlates with reducing risk. However, improving data and records management must come first. Compliance with the latest regulations is necessary, which goes hand in hand in strong data privacy and security. When dealing with privileged and sensitive information, an organization must adopt industry best practices.

There are three items of the information governance checklist, that must be top of mind. To start out, compliance readiness and maturity assessments are hugely important. Practice makes perfect and early identification of potential liabilities is crucial. Next, departmental training clearly defines roles and expectations, to ensure there are no gaps in communication. To round it all out, these measures are useless without strong data management and ecosystem definition.

These measures can each be streamlined with effective and efficient workflows. Time and cost are always factors that must be accounted for here. With constant goals of mitigating risk and increasing efficiency, reductions in overall cost and time will follow.