Amid a thick climate of client apprehension and an increasingly saturated eDiscovery market, discover how investing wisely in the right eDiscovery services could be the key to driving an effective growth agenda for your legal team.
Striving for growth amid a climate of caution
While the reasons may alter from year to year, for most litigation teams the situation remains the same – despite wanting to attract as many clients as possible, and despite putting in some of the highest working hours of any sector, client acquisition remains an uphill slog.
Currently, the timid atmosphere among prospective clients and customers is down to a number of large factors that have gradually been growing more volatile as of late.
The digital disruption of the disclosure process continues to streamline and transform legal best practices, and while on the one hand this means that legal partners can unlock new operational efficiencies and empower their staff to work more effectively, accurately and profitably, it also raises apprehensions.
Client vigilance: a double-edged sword
As technology continues to reduce and replace human labour, clients become more demanding and their expectations more rigid, all while the acceptable margin for error slowly edges closer towards nonexistence.
And as if wanting a more improved, value-added experience from their legal services wasn’t enough, clients have also grown increasingly conscious of the sensitivity of litigation data, with everyone from Adobe to the NHS being victim to very damaging and very public breaches of cybersecurity in recent years.
But that old adage about opportunity coming from the midst of chaos rings true here. While there is more pressure than ever on litigation teams and the legal sector as a whole, that also means that firms offering eDiscovery services in parallel with their disputes services can deliver greater value than their competitors – granted if you do it right (but we’ll come to that shortly).
The growth of eDiscovery in numbers
Regardless of whether your firm currently combines disclosure with technology, eDiscovery uptake is growing at a rate that legal teams would be foolish to not take note of.
Reports have predicted the global eDiscovery market to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 10% (ranging between £5-11 billion) until 2023, and Robert Half Legal has stated that in the coming years, litigation is the area of legal practice that will provide the most jobs for law professionals, dominated by those with demonstrable skills in litigation support and eDiscovery.
But the real question here is, will partners be able to leverage the expansion of eDiscovery services to fuel their own growth? Ultimately, that rests on their ability to use the most potent sales enablement tool in this current market: trust.
Competing for trust
With concerns around the apparent vulnerability of electronically stored information and digital data at an all-time high, proving your organisation to be fully deserving of the trust of your clients has never been more important.
Those who are investing in a technology-driven service like eDiscovery not only want to be sure that they’re using the most cost-effective and secure solution available, but they also want to be sure that the person they’re buying it off knows how it works down to the finest detail, so as to avoid any unwanted costs or sudden sinkholes in productivity.
Essentially, the best way to earn the trust of your clients and stand out is to outperform your competitors. That may sound like a lofty ambition, but when you consider the generally low levels of digital competency in law – which we discussed in this quick guide to digital transformation – it suddenly appears viable. Just be sure to get ahead of the curve while those profitability gains are still within reach.
Enter your eDiscovery provider
The quickest way to gain that competitive advantage and start outperforming the competition is to enlist some third-party assistance, and invest in an ongoing relationship with a worthy eDiscovery vendor.
Driving a growth agenda means serving more clients in a value-added fashion, maximising productivity by managing your time and internal staff as effectively, and keeping operating costs down, so you can then in turn make more money, and grow and improve some more.
Achieving all of the above while internally training your team and investing in the tools and technologies required to carry out market-leading eDiscovery at the same time simply isn’t feasible.
Plus, as well as placing a strain on resources, by the time you’ve invested in training your team, upgrading your processes and implementing the tools and technologies you need to deliver a leading edge service and differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack, a series of changes may have rendered your knowledge and software (which will likely have come at a significant cost) redundant.
By outsourcing these responsibilities to the right third-party provider, you can reap the rewards without these risks, and as whole enable your resources to go further, empowering your team to handle more cases and delight more clients with lower, more controllable operating costs.
Now you know that outsourcing eDiscovery is the best solution to drive your growth agenda, it’s time to learn how to assess which eDiscovery provider is right for you.
