Canadian Lawyer

w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m O c t O b e r 2 0 1 4 41 run it," she says. "It means coming up with a way to make that information accessible and shareable." Then there's cloud computing, where information that once sat on a com- pany's own servers might have moved to a third-party at another location. Peg Duncan, an e-discovery consultant based in Toronto, points out that it's get- ting increasingly difficult to know where every file is truly located. "I used to use Outlook. Now I find that I have a very competent Web client, and why should I bother having this stored on my workstation when I can store it online and not have to worry about it?" she says. "But if someone were doing e-discovery, they wouldn't find those messages on my desktop. They would have to go to the provider. It's going to be interesting to see how the courts serve any of these providers like Google or Yahoo." It's probably best if law firms rec- ognize that developing an e-discovery strategy and getting the right products to execute it is going to take some time. Vakof estimates that in some cases, acquiring the tools through standard procurement can take up to 18 months. Wortzman suggests making it easier by doing all the information gathering upfront to make the right purchasing decision. This includes a thorough look at what kind of cases crop up that typi- cally require e-discovery, the volume of data involved, and which clients are good at self-collecting data versus those who need help with the forensics. Gross- man agrees — even if firms decide to outsource, it's better to "level it out" by having a vendor on retainer, rather than spend more during a peak period when several e-discovery cases crop up at once. Glover suggests even if firms don't have a dedicated e-discovery team in place, the knowledge and expertise needs to filter out across the organization in order to avoid re-learning important les- sons. "What can happen is you have one associate on a file with an e-discovery case and they learn about a piece of soft- ware. That knowledge isn't always being passed on to the next associate," she says. One way of addressing this is by seeing e-discovery as part of a firm's overarch- ing information governance program. This is where consultants like Duncan say they are spending more of their time, so that processes around data collection and production are ironed before an e-discovery request comes up. As e-discovery expertise continues to mature, it may become one of the most marketable skills lawyers develop — and might even influence future hir- ing decisions, according to Marcus. "It's intriguing for me, because I've spent 20-plus years being in large law firms in the litigation practice. I was completely surprised that I was getting involved on the tech side," he says. "I felt like the one- eyed man in the land of the blind. Now, e-discovery is becoming a title." ntitled-2 1 2014-09-18 4:12 PM

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