‘Business intelligence is like oxygen for e‑disclosure’

The use of busi­ness intel­li­gence is now wide­spread in many areas of cor­po­rate life. A mar­ket­ing team will use infor­ma­tion such as click-through rates to gauge the suc­cess or oth­er­wise of cam­paigns, while sales teams can assess the impact of indi­vid­ual peo­ple or pro­mo­tions on tak­ings.

The legal sec­tor, though, has been slow to make use of this kind of infor­ma­tion. Yet the capa­bil­i­ty to do this exists, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the area of eDis­clo­sure. Adi Elliott, vice pres­i­dent, mar­ket plan­ning, at Epiq Sys­tems, gives the exam­ple of a cor­po­ra­tion using an in-house legal team or hir­ing a law firm to help with its lit­i­ga­tion, and deploy­ing the ser­vices of an exter­nal organ­i­sa­tion to assist with the data and process man­age­ment.

“Part of the dis­clo­sure process is to fig­ure out how to lim­it the corporation’s data to cer­tain peo­ple with­in par­tic­u­lar peri­ods of time so legal teams can look at those doc­u­ments and decide if they are rel­e­vant or priv­i­leged, before being giv­en to the oth­er side,” he says. “Cur­rent­ly each one of those projects is treat­ed as a sep­a­rate and dis­tinct task, even though a cor­po­ra­tion might be involved in very sim­i­lar projects hun­dreds of times a year.”

There are often good rea­sons for this, he adds, includ­ing the fact that dif­fer­ent peo­ple from the client organ­i­sa­tion or law firm may work on par­tic­u­lar cas­es, but the end result is that busi­ness­es are unable to iden­ti­fy any trends across cas­es or com­pare the ser­vices and effi­cien­cy of dif­fer­ent providers.

“If a busi­ness is sued 20 times a year around labour and employ­ment issues, it will ben­e­fit from know­ing what the wider trends are,” says Mr Elliott. “It needs to know which organ­i­sa­tions these claims reg­u­lar­ly come from, how many peo­ple are typ­i­cal­ly involved and how many doc­u­ments they typ­i­cal­ly have to give to the oth­er side.

“It might hire three dif­fer­ent law firms to rep­re­sent it across 20 dif­fer­ent cas­es, so which one is the most effi­cient with that data? Which col­lects the least data and which has the high­est respon­sive­ness rate in terms of that data being rel­e­vant?”

Hav­ing this kind of infor­ma­tion can help iden­ti­fy the most effi­cient and cost-effec­tive law firms, he says, as well as help organ­i­sa­tions get a bet­ter idea of how much such cas­es should cost them, and iden­ti­fy any poten­tial under­ly­ing issues in the busi­ness which could reduce the num­ber of cas­es in the first place.

We’re the first organ­i­sa­tion that is real­ly inject­ing busi­ness intel­li­gence into eDis­clo­sure, but we want to pro­mote this because it’s a valu­able process

Using a sys­tem such as Epiq Sys­tems’ eDis­clo­sure dash­board DMX gives organ­i­sa­tions the pow­er to draw much greater insight, both with­in indi­vid­ual cas­es and more gen­er­al­ly. “It allows you to col­lect the data and nor­malise the spread­sheets, Pow­er­Points and pdfs, and make it into one cohe­sive pack­age that a lawyer can make sense of,” says Mr Elliott.

“You can start with what you hand­ed over to the oth­er side and see trends with­in the case, back­wards and for­ward, which is not usu­al­ly pos­si­ble. But the real poten­tial is in pick­ing up trends across cas­es so you can be more accu­rate with your bud­get and make strate­gic changes to be more effi­cient.”

Cur­rent­ly, the legal sec­tor is right at the begin­ning of deploy­ing such inno­va­tion, says Mr Elliott, but he believes deploy­ment will pick up pace once aware­ness of the poten­tial of eDis­clo­sure gets out. “It takes a real­ly spe­cif­ic series of skillsets to do this and you have to have a few pieces in place to prop­er­ly solve this prob­lem,” he says. “We’re the first organ­i­sa­tion that is real­ly inject­ing busi­ness intel­li­gence into eDis­clo­sure, but we want to pro­mote this because it’s a valu­able process.”

In the longer term, Mr Elliott believes this kind of process will become stan­dard prac­tice for legal teams, in the same way that busi­ness intel­li­gence is used by oth­er parts of organ­i­sa­tions. “No mar­ket­ing per­son today would adver­tise for a cam­paign and not want to see A/B test­ing and click-through rates, or to cre­ate three dif­fer­ent cam­paigns that are all rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent and not want to know which one is best,” he says. “It’s like oxy­gen for busi­ness­peo­ple and this will be the same for eDis­clo­sure too.”

For more infor­ma­tion about how Epiq Sys­tems can help your busi­ness, vis­it www.epiqsystems.co.uk