Five Reasons the Cloud Beats an Appliance for Big Data E-Discovery
Big data can mean big headaches for legal professionals involved in electronic discovery. In large-scale litigation, the task of collecting and sifting through electronically stored information can be gargantuan, both in effort and cost.
When a business becomes involved in litigation or a government inquiry, its lawyers need to dig through the company’s stacks of big data in search of needles of potentially relevant documents, emails, text messages, spreadsheets, presentations and other ESI. This process of collecting, searching and reviewing ESI is typically the most expensive and time-consuming phase of any legal matter.
Without question, big data discovery would be all-but impossible were it not for technology. Sophisticated e-discovery platforms enable corporations and their counsel to get through the process with greater efficiency and economy. These platforms use advanced analytics, predictive coding, powerful search, and streamlined workflows to enable legal teams to whittle big data down to scale.
However, while there is no question as to the need for e-discovery technology, there remains debate over the better platform for delivering this technology—a local appliance (behind the firewall) or the cloud.
Ever since the early days of e-discovery, several of the leading platforms have run as local, appliance-based installations. But as the data that companies must deal with gets bigger, their legal teams are finding that these legacy appliances are no match for the advantages and capabilities of platforms based in the cloud.
Why is a cloud platform better suited to handling big data e-discovery? Here are five reasons:
Cloud Platforms Cost Less than Local Appliance
A leading factor driving businesses and law firms to the cloud for e-discovery is cost savings. With corporate legal departments under greater and greater pressure to rein in legal spending, in-house counsel are becoming more attuned to the efficiencies and savings they and their outside firms can realize through the cloud.
Savings from the cloud come in many ways. Because the cloud provider hosts the data, the user saves by having no hardware to purchase or maintain. Cloud applications run in any standard web browser, so the user avoids the expense of purchasing software and upgrades. Also, cloud systems cost less because they require less IT staff than local appliances and have less system downtime.
There is confusion in the industry about the relative costs of the cloud versus an appliance because comparisons tend to focus on discrete elements of each platform, not on the total cost of ownership. Because of this dearth of data, our company commissioned its own study. Using a hypothetical but typical e-discovery client, our study analyzed its total costs over a three-year period, using either a cloud or an in-house platform. Our analysis found a 36 percent savings in the cloud over the appliance.
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John Tredennick, Esq., is the founder and CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems, an international provider of multilingual document repositories and technology for electronic discovery and complex litigation. Formerly a nationally known trial lawyer, he was editor-in-chief of the best-selling book, “Winning with Computers: Trial Practice in the Twenty-First Century.” Recently, he was named to the Fastcase 50 as one of the legal profession’s “smartest, most courageous innovators.”
For more information about e-discovery in the cloud and Catalyst Repository Systems, visit www.catalystsecure.com
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