With the right legal document review tool, your firm can save money and ensure a smooth ediscovery process.
In 2018, Hugh Berkson was preparing his litigation practice for a rather large incoming case, and he knew he would need a comprehensive ediscovery tool to manage the large volume of data.
Hugh is a Principal attorney at McCarthy Lebit Crystal & Liffman Co., LPA, a mid-sized multipractice law firm in Cleveland, Ohio. Minimizing the cost of ediscovery was a top priority for the firm’s litigation practice, but the team quickly found that the firm’s then-current ediscovery platform’s pricing model was unpredictable and not very cost-effective.
Nonetheless, the firm stuck with the product for nearly a year before concluding that they needed a new, more predictably priced ediscovery platform.
The Challenge: Searching for a Legal Document Review Tool
Tasked with spearheading the firm’s review of ediscovery vendors and platforms, Hugh faced three critical problems as he tried to zero in on a shortlist of options:
1. Software & Data Costs
Put simply, the firm’s current ediscovery software costs were difficult to justify. “You bought a subscription in tiers, and you got so many gigabytes per tier,” Hugh said. “I just remember that it was very expensive. We were always worried about using it and running over whatever our data allotment was.”
2. Searching in Ediscovery Doc Review
The structure of the previous platform required that searches be run across multiple databases to ensure complete results. There was a constant fear of forgetting to run the right search in the right database to ensure that the proper result was found.
“I’d be rooting through the core documents [in a case], running searches and moving things from one database to another, but I’d forget what I had run before. I’d have to run the same search twice,” Hugh recalls. “And if I didn’t run it exactly the same way, the results could be different yet still relevant to the same concept. It created existential anxiety – using the software and trying to avoid this kind of thing.”
3. User Experience & Efficiency
Hugh noted that many actions in the firm’s previous ediscovery platform took too much time and required too many clicks. The inefficiency was annoying in practice and negatively affected his experience in the software platform.
The Solution
When Hugh received a document-heavy receivership case, the time was ripe for the firm to revisit its investment in ediscovery software.
“I just started Googling,” Hugh explained. “I looked on a review site for top ediscovery software. I read the reviews and visited websites to get a feel for their product offerings.” Hugh’s colleague, whom he described as having great knowledge of “the bleeding edge of technological tools,” told him directly, “If I had to do it over again, I would have gone with Nextpoint.”
Nextpoint’s unique per-user pricing was a big determining factor for Hugh. “The pricing model was so different from anyone else because Nextpoint wasn’t charging per gigabyte,” he noted. “All of my securities work is contingent fee-based, so keeping costs to a bare minimum is of critical importance. And I loved the Nextpoint pitch: ‘We want all of your work. We want you to load everything you can into our cloud-based system.’”
The Outcome
Cost was Hugh’s number one ediscovery concern, and the transition to Nextpoint delivered dramatic savings. “Our monthly costs [with Nextpoint] are close to a third of what we had been spending previously.”
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Read more about the results Hugh found with Nextpoint.
Save Money and Simplify Ediscovery
If you want to save money while streamlining your ediscovery process like McCarthy Lebit, schedule a demo with Nextpoint. You’ll see our ediscovery software and legal document review tools firsthand.
