From hard drives to inboxes, everyone is drowning in data, which has made e-discovery an increasingly costly part of litigation. Law firms have adapted by building their in-house expertise and adopting tools to help them handle cases with thousands, or even millions, of documents. But when does it make sense to team up with a tech-centric company to manage all that data?
On Jan. 6, Polsinelli announced a partnership with legal services provider UnitedLex to expand the firm’s in-house litigation support. Attorneys at the firm say they hope the collaboration, called PolsinelliPLUS, will increase efficiency and reduce litigation costs while allowing lawyers to focus on practicing the law.
“It lets lawyers be lawyers instead of e-discovery experts,” said Jay Heidrick, a shareholder in Polsinelli’s Kansas City office. While attorneys will still need to have e-discovery knowledge, Heidrick said, the partnership turns over the most technical aspects of the process to experts at UnitedLex who are “on the cutting edge” of artificial intelligence and innovation in data management.
Stacy Carpenter, co-chair for Polsinelli’s commercial litigation practice in Denver, said that while law firms have recognized the importance of innovation, they “tend to get hampered a bit” when they try to go it alone. Firms want to embrace new technology, but that often takes a back seat to other priorities.
“By having this relationship with UnitedLex, we now have a very close partnership with a company that has innovation as their to-do list item number one,” Carpenter said, adding that she expects the collaboration with the tech-focused company to allow Polsinelli to adopt new tools and processes more quickly than if the firm were working alone.
“This partnership is putting that search for efficiency and innovation front and center,” Carpenter said.
While the firm has billed PolsinelliPLUS as a “litigation solution center,” the new services won’t all be concentrated under one roof. Under the agreement, which will last at least five years, Polsinelli’s internal litigation support team will become UnitedLex employees and be contracted back to the firm. The firm will also have access to other UnitedLex staff and resources as needed.
Heidrick said having an ongoing partnership with a single service provider will help reduce costs and increase efficiency as UnitedLex professionals help Polsinelli on repeat cases for the same clients.
“That’s going to lead to efficiencies, because the more times you do something, the more efficient you become at it,” he said.
Rather than having to constantly bring new vendors or contract staff up to speed, the firm will be able to turn to a single partner that’s already familiar with Polsinelli’s clients and cases, according to Heidrick.
The firm also expects the collaboration to lighten the workload and costs associated with gathering data for litigation. Instead of sending an employee to physically collect information from a computer hard drive, Polsinelli will be able to take advantage of UnitedLex’s remote collection capabilities, said Heidrick.
For bigger data collection tasks, UnitedLex will send someone to the client’s location to obtain the information, which could be more cost effective than the firm sending its own staff.
That additional manpower is another perk of the partnership, the attorneys said. PolsinelliPLUS doesn’t just incorporate UnitedLex’s technological assistance but also its staffing services. The collaboration gives the firm access to the legal services company’s network of more than 1,500 contract attorneys for document review.
UnitedLex claims its early case assessment tool, Questio, reduces the number of documents attorneys have to review by 90%. But even with computer-assisted review, Heidrick said, at some point, humans need to lay eyes on some of the documents to weed through the information.
“Instead of in-house attorneys doing the review at higher rates, we’re able to utilize UnitedLex contract attorneys at much lower rates,” he said.
Polsinelli isn’t the first firm to partner with the legal service provider, but UnitedLex CEO Dan Reed said in an interview with AmLaw Daily that the company would “continue to be selective” about which law firms it works with and how.
UnitedLex teamed up with LeClairRyan in 2018 — a year before that firm filed for bankruptcy — to launch joint venture ULX Partners, offering legal support, finance, IT and other services to other law firms and businesses. Unlike that collaboration, PolsinelliPLUS isn’t a separate entity and will only provide litigation support for Polsinelli and its clients.
While it might be too soon to call PolsinelliPLUS part of a trend, Heidrick expects other firms to take a look at the best way to stay on top of technological advancements in litigation services.
“I do foresee that firms are going to have to make a decision as to how they’re going to invest and what is the best investment moving forward to address those issues,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see where the industry goes with it.”
—Jessica Folker, [email protected]