Ogletree Deakins Implements Litigation Support Managed Services with

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1 Ogletree Deakins Implements Litigation Support Managed Services with 23 Oct 2012 Exclusive Interview with the Ogletree Deakins' Director of Litigation Support on the Identification and Implementation of a Managed Service Offering The Cowen Group had the opportunity to catch up with Sean Reddick, the Director of Litigation Support at Ogletree Deakins to discuss delivery of litigation support services and the firm's foray into a Managed Services partnership. Ogletree underwent a detailed analysis of its litigation support offering and an evaluation of the other available options to determine the best service delivery model for the firm and its clients. The Cowen Group: We know Ogletree Deakins has finalized a new model for the delivery of litigation support services using a managed services provider. Can you share more about what you are doing? Sean Reddick: At the end of last year, the firm embarked in a process to change our litigation support business model. We previously created an internal service solution intending it to be a midsized ediscovery vendor. This resulted in a robust operations unit that was capable of processing large amounts of client data into a licensed review platform. Additionally, we utilized numerous vendors to supplement these efforts when the number of projects, or size of a project, exceeded our internal capabilities. We spent the past few years investing in this process in conjunction with the firm's growth. However, we have reached a point where our clients have bigger, more complex data sources and it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the innovation and nimbleness in the vendor market. Like any law firm, we capitalize our internal departments by committee and it's slow and cumbersome to purchase and deploy new solutions and infrastructure. Currently, the vendor market is somewhat more nimble in its ability to develop and deploy new, innovative technology, and is more flexible in handling sudden influxes of unexpectedly large data volumes. Over a three to four year period, our internal department had mixed success with user satisfaction I think many firms experience the same. We reached a point where more users felt constrained with the rigidity of our tools and process. This was affecting the overall usage of the department. That prompted us to re-evaluate the fundamental purpose of our department and how we could modify our service offerings to best serve the needs of our lawyers and clients. 1

2 At the end of last year, we decided to re-engineer our internal operations and get out of the ediscovery processing, hosting, review platform, and production business. Based on our evaluation, we valued the consultative, project management, and solutions architect services that the department provided, but were less committed to the manufacturing aspect of processing discovery data. As a result, we chose to pursue a different business model that leveraged our department's strengths and would provide superior customer service and value. Ultimately, we finalized a national managed services agreement with Iris Data Services to take over the processing, hosting, review platform, and production functions that we had previously supported in-house. How do you define Managed Services? Managed Services is significantly more than an aggregate of software platforms with hosting and project management wrapped around them. That's the standard preferred provider model and, in this case, didn't provide the level of customization and service we required. Since we are predominantly a labor and employment firm with 42 domestic offices, we not only needed "best-of-breed", innovative tools, but also needed a partner who was creative and entrepreneurial with their solution. A managed service offering has to be fluid enough to handle projects outside of the normal workflows. Although you design a solution that handles the majority of your cases, there are always going to be custom situations that arise. You have to be able to come up with a solution for this other sector and know that your vendor and process is malleable enough to fit those needs. The managed services solution we deployed was a mixture of superior people, processes and tools that were able to provide support specifically tailored to our environment. What is your service structure with Iris? Did you outsource everything, or are there specific services you continue to provide in-house? Our initial desire was to fully divest ourselves of processing, hosting, review platform, and production functions. As we analyzed the level of services our clients required, we took a hard look at whether that was really possible, or if we had to maintain some level of internal capability. We identified three specific categories of functions, the first being services we intend to retire, such as processing, hosting, review platform, and production I mentioned earlier. For clarification, when we say "review platform", we're talking about review software, not attorney reviewers. The second category consists of functions that we won't retire things not suitable to be handled by a managed services provider, such as case analysis, transcript analysis, trial support, etc. These functions typically fall to Litigation Support by default, but sometimes aren't tracked as internal services and don't lend themselves to outsourcing. 2

3 The third category is the transition of migratory functions for our legacy review databases that we will have to continue to support internally. In some instances, the attorneys may not want to migrate existing projects into the new model. Deploying new services across an organization of our size is somewhat disruptive and we can't just flip one switch off and the other one on. For a period of 12 to 18 months, we need to provide internal processing and hosting for the legacy environment, while simultaneously implementing and supporting the new model. There are also litigation support functions that we specifically did not include in the managed services agreement, for instance, forensic collection, ebriefs, and limited scanning. Because of the specific and somewhat local nature of these services, we carved them out as à la carte items not covered under the umbrella of the arrangement. Iris is still able to provide these services for us upon request. Additionally, we did not include predictive coding in the managed services agreement, despite Iris's ability to provide technology assisted review services. We may add these in the future once we refine our internal process and workflows, but for the moment it is another à la carte offering. What were the steps your firm took in evaluating the ediscovery service offering and how did you get to a decision? How long did the process take? We began by asking ourselves what business we were here for, and what pain points we were trying to solve for people. We acknowledged that litigation support requires a slightly different business model than the practice of law. Law firms make money by selling time, advice, and documents. Litigation support, at its core, is a manufacturing business. You are taking a "widget" and improving the utility and value of that widget through a particular process. We learned that our clients and attorneys didn't really care about where the data is processed, or who processes it, as long as the processing is done in a competent and cost effective manner. Once we came to those conclusions, then we asked ourselves a series of questions like, "do we want to be in the ediscovery operations business," "are we good at it," and "what is the business purpose of having this capability internally?" Our group was bifurcated in our service offering we had a centralized operations department as well as regionally deployed case managers whose role it was to explain and coordinate the services, evangelize best practices, and architect the solution. After analyzing our realization rates for both silos, it became clear that our internal and external clients valued the case management services over the operations unit. The operations unit was functioning as a vendor, but the attorneys were not valuing these internal services nor including on client invoices. Once we looked at the numbers and the customer service levels, the firm decided we didn't want to be in the operations business, but wanted to continue promoting the case manager services. The decision to pursue the new model was made at the end of 2011, which is an absolutely terrible time to try and get people to do any non-essential business. We began crafting our RFP in February It took a couple months to get input from a variety of stakeholders in order to represent 3

4 everyone's interest and communicate the comprehensive solution we were seeking. This included evaluating whether we wanted a subscription or consumption based model. Committing to purchasing a block of services monthly requires you to do a different analysis of responses than purchasing on a case-by-case basis. The RFP had a very strong RFI element to it in order to get a good sense of the respondents' capabilities. All told, it was in excess of 80 pages, which wasn't a very nice thing to do to our potential partners. We felt it was necessary in order to communicate our direction and craft something that would get us back the accurate information we needed to evaluate players from multiple levels. We released the RFP on May 1st to 11 vendors, with a 30 day turn around. We included all the big players in the market, as well as some mid-size regional players. As you can imagine, we got back voluminous responses and it took all of June and July to analyze them. We looked at the responses both subjectively and objectively. We also numerically quantified certain aspects of the RFP responses. The value was not in the bottom line grading number, but rather the way it really highlighted the key differences between players. This enabled us to identify and focus on differentiators and decide whether the differences were acceptable. By August 1st, we had two vendors identified, and spent 30 days further vetting and negotiating with them. We finalized our agreement with Iris on September 1st. In evaluating the RFP responses, could you share what were the most important criteria for making the decision? Our primary criterion was customer service, both to our attorneys and clients. However, how this criterion eventually manifested itself changed a bit during the selection process. As we flushed out the vendors' capabilities and what our true needs were, the mechanism by which we intended to provide the service evolved. We recognized that previously we were thinking that 80% of our role was as educators and evangelists for better practices, and 20% was execution. Based on our realization metrics, we recognized that our users valued the reverse, 80% execution and 20% education. That enabled us to craft a solution that provided excellent customer service not only from a value and implementation standpoint, but also gave our attorneys a vehicle to distinguish themselves from their competition. What do you think the biggest benefit to the firm will be? The biggest benefit to the firm is the ability to provide great customer service, innovative technology, and experienced project management at a very competitive cost. The model benefits clients with the knowledge from our internal lawyers and litigation support case managers but also best of breed vendor knowledge of technology and an ability to deploy the top tools in the market. 4

5 Do you have any advice to share with firms that are going through the process? Some way of helping them streamline their efforts? To a certain extent, I think that what has made us successful as litigation support/ediscovery professionals is inconstant with what makes a successful litigation support department. Given the lack of formalized training in this space, most people who end up in litigation support have been able to distinguish themselves through their ability to drive behavioral change through education and evangelizing. Fundamentally, litigation support is a business process that involves the management of multiple, concurrent assembly lines. The raw material ingested into the line is highly variable, but the output has to be consistent. We can't ignore the fact that the vendor market has become enormously successful by refining the assembly line process and set the service expectation for us as internal vendors. Whereas, previously the ability to educate was sufficient and we were able to enjoy the success of our abilities in that area, now we have to re-tool to support the manufacturing aspect of what our users need. The Cowen Group would like to thank Sean Reddick for sharing with us the process Ogletree underwent for evaluating and implementing a new model. Throughout the fourth quarter of 2012, The Cowen Group will be discussing with senior executives in ediscovery how they are providing litigation support services. The purpose of this effort is to update our 2011 Models & Structures Report which help to define and clarify the service delivery models in practice at leading AmLaw 200 firms. We will be conducting independent interviews with senior executives at law firms, discussing at our Leadership Breakfast series throughout the United States this quarter and hosting a series of webinars with the New New Leaders to support the effort. If you are interested in participating in any of the above, please contact Maribel Rivera ([email protected]) or Jennifer Schwartz ([email protected]). Sean Reddick is the Director of Litigation Support at Ogletree Deakins. Based in Washington, DC, Mr Reddick works with Ogletree's attorneys and clients to develop and implement internal and external solutions for effectively managing large document and electronic discovery projects throughout the entire case life-cycle. Mr Reddick has diverse experience in the areas of ediscovery law, information governance, forensic collection and analysis, litigation readiness and response, and discovery compliance. Mr Reddick is also an expert in designing and building internal litigation support departments for national and international law firms. Prior to joining Ogletree Deakins, Mr Reddick served as the National Manager of Litigation and Practice Support for Akerman Senterfitt. Mr Reddick received his JD from Nova Southeastern University and a BA in History from Colorado State University. 211 E 43 Street, 1606 New York, NY (212)