For Bisceglia & Associates, a Vaughan, Ontario, Canada-based firm with eight lawyers, uploading and processing case data in a legacy, locally housed eDiscovery system worked well on smaller cases. But when the solution wasn’t able to sufficiently handle larger files with hundreds of thousands of documents, or when the firm received for some new construction cases, they started to think of other options for processing all that data.
Emilio Bisceglia decided to move larger cases into a cloud eDiscovery solution from IPRO to not only leverage the advanced processing power of the new technology, but also gain assistance from IPRO services to supplement their small team in finding and preparing relevant documents within these massive files.
The cloud solution has enabled the firm to become more efficient with processing and understanding complex information within their data sets – including drawings, texts, emails, and other data – and remain competitive with larger law firms.
Cost and functionality cloud benefits
As a small firm, Bisceglia relies on a third party for all IT and network infrastructure – including a server that runs their legacy eDiscovery system. So, adding another server, or expanding existing hardware capability, would have been a financial lift for the firm, which doesn’t pass along changes in infrastructure costs to clients.
But by migrating cases with over 1,000 documents to the IPRO cloud, the firm was not only able to gain the additional processing power they needed, but also leverage a modern solution that was within their price range, said Fernando Souza, a lawyer at the firm. “The cloud solution was within our budget and justified,” he said.
Self service helps for cloud move
Bisceglia uses self service to load 70-80% of cases into their legacy or IPRO cloud eDiscovery solution so lawyers can review some documents while others are still loading. But with the cloud solution, more lawyers, as well as IPRO services staff, can securely view the information online without having to access and clog up their local network, enabling for faster review and more of a case management process for larger files, Souza said.
We chose IPRO cloud because it provided the additional functionality that we needed, excellent technical assistance and support, and because the price was reasonable.
Fernando Souza, Lawyer
Self service also allows Bisceglia to retain control of organizing their case data the way their lawyers want so they can go back and easily review documents in detail. The firm also uses IPRO services with the cloud solution to identify documents lawyers need to review.
“When we run up against something we aren’t familiar with in our documents, we can just reach out to IPRO and put in a request for clarification. They are very good at responding and reconfiguring,” Souza said. “The benefit of the cloud is having those services and additional people doing case management.”
Customizing document structure for additional users
Souza and other lawyers at the firm, together with law clerks, are currently taking the lead on how Bisceglia loads and processes documents in the IPRO cloud. Being able to have this functionality in house has helped them better manage the data and create new processes for how the entire firm handles cases both big and small, Souza said. After other Bisceglia lawyers review the documents Souza has organized, he often goes back and does additional searches for them to find other relevant data.
“I’m working more on how we are organizing our documents to make them be easily available for other lawyers,” he said. “At some point we would like to offer more availability for our other lawyers, or we could go to more of a case management process with IPRO.”