When ellwood Evidence Inc. wanted to move away from a disparate collection of local and hosted eDiscovery tools, the ellwood team sought a system that would provide a unified and comprehensive platform for their work - no matter what clients’ case needs were.
To create such a holistic workflow solution, the Toronto-based litigation support services provider migrated to IPRO, first adding discovery ][ Local and TRIAL DIRECTOR360 for trial presentation, then later adding IPRO’s OPEN DISCOVERY to offer end-to-end services for its clients, no matter the case size or complexity.
With the entire IPRO eDiscovery platform, ellwood Evidence now has a comprehensive view of their workflow and has been able to streamline the processes for its data entry, coding, analysis, processing, production, hosting and training services, allowing it to scale up and down with the different solutions, depending on the needs of each case and client.
Platform Approach Leads to Improved Workflows
As ellwood Evidence implemented each of the IPRO solutions, it took full advantage of IPRO’s extensive training courses so they could not only recommend which system to use for each client, but also improve internal workflows. “This allowed us to get a better understanding of how all the pieces talk to each other so we can be more efficient and confident in our workflows,” said Stephanie Williams, Director of eDiscovery at ellwood Evidence. “It allows us to scale to our clients’ needs and the scope of their files, and scale within the product line itself.”
Currently, when clients have a large document case, the service provider typically uses OPEN DISCOVERY to leverage the solution’s advanced analytics and other tools to help cull down the data and more quickly find relevant information. It also uses the cloud-based solution with clients that don’t have the infrastructure to manage their data in house. But discovery ][ Local is often a better fit for smaller cases that only have a few hundred documents or a large amount of paper documents – or just need a linear review and don’t need all the extra features in OPEN DISCOVERY, Williams said.
Choose Your Own eDiscovery
Some clients, however, already utilize IPRO solutions and want to continue using them with ellwood Evidence, and others have their own specific data needs. So, ellwood Evidence now enables these clients to choose the specific eDiscovery solution that it will use for their case.
If clients are torn between the products, the service provider is able to highlight the benefits of each solution to help the client choose the best one that meets their needs.
“Those who have been using IPRO, I’ve never heard complaints – they are all content and happy with IPRO. But the fact that we’ve been able to switch between versions makes clients more comfortable,” Williams said. “IPRO allows us to have an end-to-end solution by one particular company to leverage for all our clients. The fact that we still have it in a modular sense allows us to have a platter of offerings for our clients and pick and choose to meet their needs and not offer everything at once.”
Exclusively Running on IPRO
Prior to implementing OPEN DISCOVERY, ellwood Evidence used disparate products for client projects that required heavy data processing when they needed to move data from one product to the other. Now, the power of the cloud-based OPEN DISCOVERY has enabled it to release those non-IPRO systems and streamline its products into a single family of tools that can work together on client case data. As a result, it’s become the only Canadian service provider running their eDiscovery support platform exclusively on IPRO.
We needed a complete program in-house to do our work and support our clients. The whole IPRO suite meets those needs.
Stephanie Williams, Director of eDiscovery at ellwood Evidence.
“We can do heavier processing in OPEN DISCOVERY and leverage its analytics capabilities, then stage the case in the desktop or even into an IPRO portable format if the client is more comfortable with that,” Williams said. “Having all of our products from one company, one umbrella, has helped us to get a better understanding of our processes and how documents go from end to end with consistent metrics.”