Effective E-Discovery Project Management

As our work force has shifted to mobile and remote working practices (a trend in place before COVID, which only accelerated during the pandemic), businesses have turned to collaborative messaging tools such as Slack and various versions of Teams to manage communications. On the positive side, by using these messaging tools, organizations are able to more efficiently discuss ideas and brainstorm solutions. However, when an organization becomes involved in a dispute and those communications are potentially relevant to the dispute and need to be preserved and collected, the process may not be as straightforward as a simple email collection.

It’s a Friday afternoon and your weekend is about to start…and yes - you guessed it…a last minute production request comes in and your plans are no longer the same. Like many other e-discovery professionals, I’ve been in this position too many times to count. To ensure that I remember all of the various conditions that should be considered and checked and double-checked in preparing productions, I recommend using a checklist to make sure you are top of all of it!

There is a lot of talk around project management across all industries. In fact, according to Quora.com, the US alone has approximately 290,000 people that hold the PMP® (Project Management Professional) certification. I am one of those individuals. When I was first introduced to the PMP curriculum I was not sure how it would complement my e-discovery skill set but I soon learned it provides a valuable set of tools that can be directly translated to the e-discovery industry.