How To Be An Amazing eDiscovery Team Member Posted By Joedie Villanueva on October 7, 2011
You’re sitting at your desk all day. Work is piling up. Pressure is piling up. And yet, somehow, you’re supposed to be a great eDiscovery team member. What do you do?
Take Initiative
For starters, even if your direct supervisor isn’t in the office or lives across the country, you never know who you could impress. When you’re going through the eDiscovery process, look for value. Take charge of your role and own it. You might feel like you’re the unimportant litigation support on the bottom of the totem pole, but if you show that your work is amazing and your opinions are supported, you won’t stay that way for long.
Create Efficient Workflow
The nonstop work of a law firm can sometimes clash with vendors, who don’t always have to work the long hours that lawyers put in each day. To prevent a mad rush in the end, ask good questions at the start of the eDiscovery process and create an efficient work strategy that will help everyone coordinate their role effectively.
Communicate Timelines
When work is crazy, you aren’t always thinking about getting data out the door to the vendor to process it at the beginning of the week. Sometimes, Friday at 5 p.m. rolls around, and you have just enough time to send it to the vendor before their workday ends. However, this can pose a problem for the vendor, who might not be ready for it at the end of the work week.
The best way to avoid this problem is to communicate your timeline with the vendor. Shoot them a quick email telling them what’s going on and when to be ready for the data. Even though they’re at the end of the command chain, they’re the ones that need to turn it around the quickest for you so you can still meet your deadline. By creating a project road map, you’ll allow them to prepare for what’s coming, where it’s coming from and when to expect it. This enables them to do a better job on your data, giving you a better and more useful product in the end.
Form Good Partnerships
Establishing peer trust and partnership with a vendor is a great way to encourage good work all around. Feeling good about who you work with translates to better work and happier people. It’s kind of like karma—if you put out good vibes and maintain a good working relationship with everyone, then good things will happen.
The next time you feel like you’re drowning in papers and arguments, or that nothing you do makes a difference, revisit these concepts and get inspired.
Originally published on Discovery Brain.
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