Imagine you’re in a crowded stadium, sharing an enclosed box with a small group of people. The box has big windows, showing you the game down on the field—as well as thousands of cheering fans rooting for the winning home team.
Now imagine everyone in the box with you is either cheering for the opposing team or completely indifferent to the game’s outcome. This is what it’s like to be your team’s sole evangelist for analytics technology in today’s e-discovery landscape.
Even if your colleagues accept your enthusiasm, if they aren’t getting on board with you, it’s tough to put everyone on a trajectory toward victory all on your own.
The key to getting started is garnering excitement from your colleagues—after all, you need one another’s skills and expertise to succeed. Check out these tips on just how to spread your excitement from some of The Relativity Blog’s analytics veterans.
Mike Hagen, Procopio, on painting the picture:
“Use real life examples. Seeing is believing, and you need to use real data sets to make them believe. Otherwise, they might be skeptical that your demo is rigged. Numbers are great for this. Start with the total number of items in your workspace. Then, one by one, show how each of the analytics tools can chop that number down to a more acceptable size.”
Caroline Pollard, Ballard Spahr, on making analytics feel like a no-brainer:
“People tend to think of analytics as being useful only for cases with large amounts of documents. But analytics is just as useful in small matters. We recently had a 16,000-document case with a very tight budget. Using analytics in combination with search terms and unique term exclusions allowed us to reduce the data set in a defensible manner and allowed us to complete the document review under budget. Honestly, if you are not incorporating analytics into your workflow, you are doing a disservice to your clients.”
Cristin Traylor, McGuireWoods, on discovering the best motivator:
“We really didn’t need much motivation to use analytics once we saw the reduction in data as well as the increased review speeds. Analytics provide a better way to organize and manage data, and teams don’t usually say no to something that makes their life easier.”
Yvette Bula & Jessica Lockett, Commonwealth Legal, on seeking inspiration from effective workflows:
“Simplicity is the key—design workflows that support the success of the client experience and drive the desired results. The best advice I could give is ‘know your data.’”
“Case studies can be a great motivator in getting legal teams to think differently about their approach to managing growing volumes of documents. Glimpsing real-life examples of how others have managed costs by leveraging analytics can ignite an openness and readiness to be more innovative, particularly around document review.”
Bridgette Harris, on using analytics as a confidence booster:
“My clients are attorneys seeking technical solutions for handling their large-scale document reviews. I always recommend analytics to them because attorneys love checks! They love to check, confirm, and reconfirm before sending out a production. I love giving them more options for this, such as using clustering to review the types of documents tagged Not Responsive or looking at textual near-duplicates to confirm no other privileged documents are being produced.”
How do you motivate your team—or your clients—to take advantage of modern analytics workflows? Let us know in the comments or @kCura on Twitter.
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