eDiscovery admins are repeatedly being asked to do many things in a small amount of time. Even though technology has made their lives easier, the amount of data and the problems it comes with have consistently grown in the past decade, thereby increasing time spent on manual and repetitive tasks.
A smart eDiscovery tool should be able to adapt itself to a user’s workflow and increase efficiencies. One of the ways to squeeze more time out of the day is to let the software do the work by automating your workflow. This reduces the boredom and time spent doing repetitive tasks.
Why is it beneficial to automate?
- Automating redundant tasks can help free up time to focus on more important issues. For example, an admin doesn’t have to wait for processing to finish to plan out the next step in the eDiscovery workflow. They can just schedule what needs to happen when a certain action finishes and their workflow is repeated automatically
- Automating a task ensures that it’s defensible in court because an action with the same settings is run over and over. An audit trail of how many items were affected every time automation runs helps an admin keep a record for the courts if needed
Picture this…you’ve created a case and started processing. While you’re waiting, you can create automation rules that will kick in once the processing finishes. The first action you can set up is to look for responsive items and copy the matching items to a folder. You can then run another automated process that will identify privileged documents within the responsive documents, tag the results privileged, and move the matching items to a different folder.
Another example is to automatically move documents tagged with a certain tag by first-pass reviewers to a folder so that second-pass reviewers can start their reviewing.
Every time new data is collected, the same rules are applied without any intervention from you.
What are some other ways that you’ve automated your workflows?