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TECH SUPPORT Cost savings have led Bell Canada to bring more discovery functions into its legal department. BY GERRY BLACKWELL more Canadian companies in the com- ing months. It is increasingly insourc- ing e-discovery. As we saw last month in the first E-discovery B — are you in or out? ell Canada has been at the fore- front of a trend that will likely affect legal departments in many in this two-part series on e-discovery insourcing, there are a few reasons companies and law firms do it. For Bell it was simple: cost savings. Melanie Schweizer, senior counsel in the company's litigation group, remem- bers one case in particular that brought home the need to develop an in-house capability. Bell had just gone through an expensive e-discovery outsourcing exercise for one case, when another dis- pute arose involving the same data. "We wanted to look at the data to see if there was anything hurtful or helpful there [related to the second dispute]," says Schweizer. "And we assumed it would be very low cost because all they had to do was pull the same data and run a keyword search." The quote from the outsourcer was for $80,000 to $100,000. "It was frustrating that we didn't have 24 JUNE 2010 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com the tools to do it ourselves." Needless to say, Bell has the tools now. According to e-discovery consultant and lawyer Dominic Jaar, president of Montreal-based Ledjit Consulting Inc. and a former colleague of Schweizer's at Bell, Canadian enterprises are at various stages of following in Bell's footsteps — but are generally three to four years behind their U.S. counter- parts. Most now are at least looking at insourcing the first phases in the E-Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) related to information management, ENRICO VARASSO Part II