3 Things That Are Wasting Your Legal Budget

Virtually everyone across all industries is currently trying to “do more with less.” The legal world is no different. More and more attorneys want to know what investments will actually get returns, and many have become skeptical of pay models that once seemed infallible.

The best legal budgets that “do more with less” are a perfect calibration of technology investments, internal functionality, and strategic outside partners. At Contact, we pride ourselves on helping legal teams find the right balance that works for them. There are certain challenges we encounter over and over again, and today we’re letting you in on some of the common stumbling blocks that result in overspending.

1. Too Many Vendors

There’s often money to be saved by reducing the total number of vendors that you rely on to help you with litigation. Almost any vendor will offer you better pricing on services if you buy more from them. It also mitigates risk to limit sensitive data to as few people/organizations as possible.

The thing is, no managing partner or general counsel wakes up one day and says “I’d like my sensitive data scattered across as many vendors as possible.” So why is it such a common problem?

One issue could be misunderstanding which vendors are capable of what services. If you hired eDiscovery “R” Us for a processing job last month, but no one thought to ask if they also had forensic services, you might go to a separate vendor for this month’s collection. Meanwhile, you could’ve gotten a better deal by bundling forensics and processing together at eDiscovery “R” Us.

Another issue could be overestimating the need for “specialized” vendors. Many vendors position themselves as “specialists” but it’s not always clear if they’re adding more value than more generalized vendors who can do the same job. Such specialists certainly play a valuable role in the eDiscovery industry; however, it can be incredibly difficult for lawyers to decide if a specialist is necessary for a given matter.

Still another issue could be poor communication between team members who are all hiring vendors. Ideally, you don’t want different lawyers each blasting their own unique network of vendors for each new matter. What if Tom, Dick, and Harry each have their own internal investigation? You might be able to get a better deal by buying legal technology services “in bulk” from one vendor rather than letting Tom, Dick, and Harry each pick their favorite from their own address books. 

We recommend having some kind of system that allows all attorneys to pull their vendors from the same pool, and routinely weeding out the ones that underperform or are overpriced. There are even tech solutions such as Contact’s M8™ that are specifically designed to help you with this. It’s also good to have eDiscovery expertise either internally or in a trusted consultant. This expert can help determine if you need to bring in specialized vendors or if giving the entire job to one comprehensive vendor is the better move.

2. Investing in outsourcing rather than training.

As the old adage goes, “give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.”

Oftentimes, your internal team is capable of more than you think, they just need the right training. This is especially true as long as law schools focus on the theory and history of the law but devote relatively little time to teaching lawyers how to use technology.

It’s a waste of money to buy technology your team never adopts, but it’s also a waste of money to pay vendors to do things you could do internally. The best way to walk the fine line between these two forms of malinvestment is usually some combination of the right technology paired with proper training on how to use it.

Sometimes legal teams choose to switch to more modern technology, but grossly underestimate the growing pains of that transition. Don’t make that mistake. Understand that there will be an adjustment period, and give your team the requisite empathy. Ask them what resources they’ll need to become confident on the new solution and act on that intel. Maybe you’ll want to plan training workshops, or temporarily hire some extra support staff that can be on-call to answer your team’s questions. 

3. Paying lawyers to do things non-lawyers could do

Lawyers have hard-earned expertise and deserve to be compensated for it. The most efficient organizations tend to make the most of their attorneys’ knowledge and talent. They can’t do that when those lawyers are stuck sifting through spreadsheets or combing through the internet for trademark violations.

Efficient organizations let their lawyers focus on lawyering. If there’s enough grunt work to justify hiring more support staff, they do. That could take the form of an outside service provider, or bringing on more internal hires.

While it could seem counterintuitive to hire more people when budgets are tight, firms that give lawyers the support they need can usually afford to take on heavier caseloads and generate more revenue in the long run. In corporate settings, the legal department is less of a bottleneck when lawyers have ample support staff.

Every case is different, and there is a myriad of different reasons why you might not be making the most of your legal budget. It’s important to get to the root cause of such inefficiencies and come up with long term solutions that will work for you.  

If you have any other questions about how to make the most of your legal budget, reach out to Contact today.

7 Deadly Sins of Service Providers: Part 3

Note: This post is the conclusion to our blog series, “The 7 Deadly Sins of Legal Service Providers.” You can find the first 3 “sins” in Part 1 and the second 2 in Part 2. Here are the final two things alternative legal service providers do, either intentionally or unintentionally, that hurt their clients in the end.

Sin #6: Seeing your independence as a threat

All too often, eDiscovery service providers try to perpetuate client dependency. They want constant meetings/emails with you. They want you to be in the dark unless you go through them. They fear that giving you the ability to do more discovery work yourself, or more information about the work you’re paying them to do will hurt their business. This should give you pause.

If your service provider truly consists of experts in the field, they should be secure in the knowledge that they will always be helpful to you, no matter how much you internalize discovery. After all, how many lawyers worry about their clients suddenly firing them to defend themselves in court?

They don’t, because they know that their knowledge and expertise eclipses their clients’ knowledge of the law, and likely always will. True expertise will always be in demand. If your service provider is trying to monopolize as much of the process as they can out of fear that you’ll one day learn how easy it is to do it yourself… are they really experts?

Good service providers will let you keep control over the parts of discovery you’d like to control. (As we mentioned in part 1, an all-or-nothing approach is another sin!) Great service providers will even help you take more of the work in-house. That’s because they know that ultimately, they’re the discovery experts and they will always be able to help you in ways you can’t help yourself, much the same way lawyers can always be helpful to their clients.

Sin #7: Putting their own growth above efficiency

Service providers are businesses, and it’s totally normal for businesses to want growth. However, growing too quickly without carefully strategizing how you’re going to scale often leaves once-happy clients frustrated.

The story goes something like this:

  1. Let’s start an eDiscovery business since we know the space well, and are pretty good at it. Great! Clients are happy!

  2. There’s so much work to do! Time to hire more people. Great eDiscovery practitioners can be hard to come by, so maybe we’ll hire a few people here and there that are decent, but not great. We’ll also need more people in different cities to take care of clients in those other markets, which might hinder communication between teams if we’re not careful.

  3. You know what would really help though? Getting an injection of capital from investors who know absolutely nothing about eDiscovery. That way we can hire more new people and open more offices.

  4. Several years have gone by now. Remember those investors who knew nothing about eDiscovery? They’ve continued to take on more and more clients regardless of their team’s ability to keep up. They’ve instituted rigid procedures that their subordinates (who do know how eDiscovery works) have to follow; more work has to get subcontracted out; the ability to routinely reassess and improve procedures as discussed in Part 2 is significantly compromised; worst of all, those once-happy clients find that their once-reliable vendor is getting more and more difficult to work with as each year goes by.

Too often, vendors that do this are able to coast by on the prestige and name recognition they’ve built up despite their decline in quality. They grew, and will likely keep growing, but at the expense of efficiency and client satisfaction.

Now, none of this is to say that any eDiscovery business that’s big is automatically bad. Certainly there are advantages that come along with scale. It’s simply to say that as a service provider scales, it’s important to constantly ask “how will this affect my clients?” Careful, deliberate growth is a good thing, and usually benefits clients as well as service providers. Clients can streamline their outsourcing to fewer vendors as those vendors get big enough to expand their capabilities. Reckless growth that disregards client needs often creates inefficient workflows and lowers that vendor’s ability to tailor services to the matter at hand.


That concludes our 7 Deadly Sins series. We hope these blogs gave you an idea of what to look for in an ALSP if you’re in the market for one, and we hope they help other ALSPs better serve their clients. If you have more questions, or simply want to let us know what you think makes a good ALSP, you can reach out to us at info@contactdiscoveryservices.com or on social media.

7 Deadly Sins of Legal Service Providers: Part 2

Last week we shared with you the first 3 Deadly Sins of Legal Service Providers. Well, we’re back at it now with part 2! Here are two more “sins” of eDiscovery service providers.

Sin #4: Not reevaluating their own processes often enough

A man once said “I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways.”

eDiscovery is an ever-changing industry, and it’s easy to get so caught up in client needs that providers never turn their focus inward. However, it’s precisely because of that fast pace and constantly shifting nature of the industry that self-reflection and improvement is important. A workflow that made sense six months ago might not make sense now.  Maybe there’s new software improvements that could streamline processes you’re currently using multiple solutions for.

A good service provider has to be vigilant about their own processes as well as all the work they do for clients. At the end of the day, an eDiscovery vendor that isn’t taking care of itself will struggle to take care of you. Let me repeat that.

An eDiscovery vendor that isn’t taking care of itself will struggle to take care of you.

You probably wouldn’t hire a personal trainer that doesn’t take time for their own workouts. This is no different.

Another great perk to hiring eDiscovery providers who are routinely reevaluating their own processes and implementing their own improvements is that that they can apply that experience to their work for clients.

If a service provider has recently evaluated different technology and implemented it internally, they’re in a great spot to answer your questions about the pros and cons of those solutions. They know what curveballs you should anticipate through implementation. They can help you train your team on new platforms. Their first hand experience translates into valuable knowledge that benefits their clients.

At Contact, we recently decided to merge two departments into one. It’s not that it was bad or wrong to do things the way we were before, we just realized that advancements in technology allowed us to train employees in things they couldn’t do before. Sure, we still would’ve been a functional eDiscovery vendor if we had stuck to our status quo. However, training more employees in more disciplines and making it easier for them to communicate with each other will make us an even more well-oiled machine.

On that note….

Sin #5: Not cross-training your employees

A lot of eDiscovery marketers (myself included) love to talk about their “specialized expertise.” And why not? eDiscovery is a discipline all to itself, apart from the discipline of lawyers. More than that, eDiscovery is the intersection of several very different disciplines, notably technology, law, and business. For that reason, no one can truly be a “specialist” in every last part of the process.

People who make great data engineers are not necessarily well suited for managing document review, and vice versa. People who understand the litigation process inside and out may be completely clueless when it comes to implementing new information governance practices that are compliant and secure. Discovery takes a village.

Sometimes eDiscovery service providers are so dead set on hiring ”specialists” that they lose sight of this bigger picture. They have a lot of people who are great at one specific thing, but lack the knowledge to effectively communicate with their teammates and clients.  

At Contact, we’ve found the key lies somewhere in the middle: hire specialists, but also make sure team members have a firm grasp on each other’s specialties. Our team is able to understand our clients’ larger strategy and how their specialty fits into it. This allows for more collaboration between people of different backgrounds, which often leads to better-fitting solutions for clients’ challenges.

Service providers who use this philosophy are also usually able to deal with the regular (or not-so-regular) curveballs of business with fewer disruptions to service. In March 2020, when nearly every company on the planet had to completely rethink how they do business, we were able to shift to our new COVID-world model with zero disruptions to clients’ cases. That’s partially because so many of our team members understood work outside their specialty.


Curious to know what the final two sins of eDiscovery service providers? Follow us on social media for updates!

The 7 Deadly Sins of Legal Service Providers: Part 1

Ah, the wonderful world of alternative legal service providers, or ALSPs. Like it or not, they’re a necessary part of the modern legal landscape. This is especially true in areas of the law where complex matters with large sums of data are commonplace. Such areas include intellectual property, corporate law, and antitrust, just to name a few. There comes a point where lawyers just can’t do it alone.

The problem is that legal service providers can all look pretty similar on the surface. This is especially true in fields such as eDiscovery that rely heavily on technology to get the job done. They all have “cutting edge technology;” they all have the “highest standards of security” and “certified experts” doing the work.

Usually, as long as lawyers have worked with someone before and the work got done adequately in time for the deadline, they’re happy. Unfortunately, a service provider can meet these criteria and still fall short in other respects without their clients realizing it.

That’s why we’ve put together the “7 Deadly Sins of Service Providers.” If you’re an ALSP reading this, we hope this helps make you a better ALSP. If you’re a law firm or in-house team, we hope it helps you figure out if you’re really getting the most bang for your buck out of these companies.


Deadly Sin #1: An “all-or-nothing approach”

Some of the marketing buzzwords that legal service providers use for this include words like “comprehensive,” “end-to-end,” and “all-inclusive.”

It sounds great on paper, the idea of one solution or company that can solve all your eDiscovery woes. Full disclosure: I’ve written versions of this pitch for Contact’s eDiscovery Managed Services, and I fully believe such all-inclusive approaches can be right for some clients, especially if it’s what that organization actually asked for.

However, it shouldn’t be the only thing on the menu.  

Sometimes clients and potential clients aren’t in this boat. They know there are certain aspects of the EDRM they can handle just fine, either internally or with other vendors, and they’re only in the market for a specific service such as processing, hosting, or forensics. Maybe they want to license software to address specific challenges such as mobile data, but are content to do most of the work themselves and maintain 90 percent of their status quo.

Some eDiscovery providers can’t handle that. Their model is based on the idea that clients should abandon anything and everything about their existing workflows to adopt whatever new technology or services that company is selling. They don’t know how to be helpful without completely turning their clients’ worlds upside down, and sometimes that can do more harm than good.

If your vendor’s answer is ALWAYS to throw the baby out with the bathwater and buy something new, they probably don’t have your best interests at heart. 

Deadly Sin #2: Believing new automatically = better

Sometimes new is better. Sometimes it isn’t. Remember that time Coke tried to make “New Coke?” That can happen in the eDiscovery space too.

On the tech development side of the industry, it just doesn’t look good to sit on your hands and say “yup, that thing we built two years ago is still the best!” There’s a perpetual pressure to innovate, exacerbated by the fact that all the competitors are constantly launching new products as well. That can spill over into legal service providers feeling like they have to offer the latest (but maybe not greatest) tech.

New technology can be great, especially if it’s addressing other impactful changes in the law or how technology is being used. For example, a solution that can better handle data from collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams will probably prove more helpful than a platform that is simply giving a prettier interface to emails and pdfs. This innovation was spurred by other industry developments rather than the pressure to get something new on the market just because everybody else is.

Sometimes the new solution is in fact better, but comes with significant adoption challenges like migrating data from one system to another and training staff on the new system. Perhaps the benefits of “new” are still there, but not in large enough quantities to outweigh the costs and justify the switch.

Either way, good legal service providers can help you weigh the pros and cons of implementing new technology. They won’t sell you something new that you don’t need just to make a quick buck.

Deadly Sin #3: NOT evaluating what your current investments can actually do

This is somewhat of an extension of sin #2. If you believe new tech is automatically better than older tech, it can lead to underestimating the problem-solving capacity of resources you already have.

Oftentimes legal service providers and tech companies are so excited to sell their flashy new products that they fail to assess whether or not those new products are really necessary for the matter at hand.

At Contact, sometimes clients come to us looking for new technology not because they don’t have suitable technology already, but because they don’t understand what their current technology could do. Sometimes the answer isn’t new tech, but just good ol’ fashioned know-how.

Your provider should always ask in-depth questions about what tech you already have before they try to sell you something new. If there’s outside counsel with their own resources, that should be taken into account as well. Service providers should ask about your team’s specific challenges so they can figure out if the issue is truly technology limitations, or just users who haven’t learned the ropes of that technology yet.

Oftentimes, we find that just a few tweaks to the technology our clients already have can solve their problems more economically than implementing new technology.


That concludes Part 1. Curious to learn what the other about Deadly Sins of Legal Service Providers? Follow the Contact Blog for updates. Visit us on Social Media and let us know what your biggest red flags are when dealing with service providers.