Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting

Achieve Continuous Discovery Cost Control | 7 Reasons to Use Atlas to Control Discovery Costs — Now | Discovery Cost Forecasting Capabilities | Related Products

Achieve Continuous Discovery Cost Control

  • Predict portfolio discovery costs
  • Optimize matter resolution
  • Negotiate scope and scope changes

With the Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting extension of the Atlas Enterprise Discovery Management solution set, reduce discovery and litigation spend by informing review data volume decisions, resolving matters earlier at a lower cost, seeing and avoiding impending costs, improving negotiating power to reduce scope.

7 Reasons to Use Atlas to Control Discovery Costs — Now

  1. Discovery and review have ballooned to 50-70% of legal costs

  2. Total cost is central to case strategy — yet without a reliable cost estimate, it is difficult to make good decisions

  3. Without good cost understanding, legal executives can't see or control impending costs across the portfolio

  4. Getting cost visibility requires data most attorneys don't have, such as key matter facts, pricing and historical matter context to calibrate the likely course of costs

  5. Outside counsel is insensitive to costs and can't reliably estimate data volume

  6. Corporate counsel is ill-equipped to routinely negotiate because they lack information to make a compelling burden argument

  7. Escalating data volume is driving high costs — and ironically, the legal holds process can contribute to higher volume if Legal relies on IT to retain all data and disable routine disposal, which perpetuates the vicious cycle

Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting

This Atlas decision support product includes comprehensive reports and intuitive dashboards to assess single matter and total portfolio discovery costs by fiscal period. Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting provides a shared view for Legal, Finance and business partners to avoid surprises and drive decision making.

Single matter discovery cost control: Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting automatically calculates discovery costs for a matter at its outset. Discovery cost estimates are continuously updated as matter facts change so that attorneys can determine earliest and optimized matter resolution. Attorneys can control cost and effectively negotiate smaller scope through history, forecasts and scenario analysis. Legal teams can balance risk and cost in making narrow vs. wide discovery decisions.

Portfolio discovery cost control: With accurate forecasts, Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting enables coordinated expense timing and high cost matter visibility with finance, legal and business peers.

Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting Capabilities

Provides Continuous, Accurate Discovery Costs

  • Instantly estimate discovery costs when the matter is scoped to make better strategy decisions
  • Set litigation profiles, costs, and budget models for your company
  • Automatically track actual matter facts such as custodian pool, data sources, and collection volumes in Atlas Discovery for Legal — no data entry is needed to project cost
  • Predict matter discovery cost trajectory by leveraging current matter scope and historical facts
  • Define litigation and cost profiles by matter type for finer grained view
  • Continuously recalculate cost projections as matter facts change, providing counsel with an up-to-date, accurate, holistic financial picture — total projected discovery costs are always visible

Improves Your Negotiating Power to Reduce Scope

  • Iterate scenarios and options to make fully-informed arguments and stronger recommendations
  • Save a scenario as the new best stance on production scope
  • Use cost data offensively to reduce collection and production volume. Make more routine and compelling burden and cost shifting arguments sooner with push-button reports
  • Publish graphical cost reports for counsel and courts
  • Use cost calculator to estimate the other party's costs and better prepare for settlement discussions

Enables You to Resolve Matters Earlier

  • Provide continuous cost assessment that enables optimal settlement decisions throughout the case

Enables Finance to Control Fiscal Period Impact

  • Detect potential future cost spikes from changes in custodian and collection volume, by matter and fiscal period
  • Present forecasts by fiscal period to finance and business partners to avoid surprises and drive decision making

Helps You Decide:

  • How much to collect?
    Assess discovery cost before you collect to reduce review volume
  • Which matters should settle sooner?
    Quickly identify matters where costs may exceed merits
  • Which matters are incurring and are likely to incur high costs?
    Prevent runaway or unnecessary costs with continuous cost assessment
  • How to align with outside counsel?
    Take control of estimating cost, ensure outside counsel understands cost constraints and advise outside counsel of your objectives early and often
  • Which discovery costs are appropriate for which fiscal period?
    Provide finance with a portfolio view of discovery cost estimate by fiscal period

Related Products in the Atlas Suite

Automate Discovery Processes with Atlas Enterprise Discovery Management
 Legal, IT and Lines of Business can eliminate risk and reduce the effort required to manage legal holds and collections with Atlas for Rigorous Discovery. The current and historic data logged in Atlas Discovery for Legal provides the foundation for the decision support in Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting.

Reduce Discoverable Mass with Atlas Value-Based Retention
 The Atlas for Value-Based Retention ensures records are maintained and disposed according to legal obligations. Atlas Information Governance for IT extends the definition and management of data sources across the enterprise to enable precise and narrow scoping at the outset of a matter. By quickly putting a global retention program in place, Atlas enables defensible disposal to dramatically reduce discoverable mass and data storage costs.

Further Automate IT Discovery Efforts with Atlas Compliance Automation
 Eliminate manual collections and enable attorneys to collect directly with Atlas Compliance Automation. With Atlas Compliance Automation, preserve and collect data directly from email archives, content management applications, and file shares. Atlas Discovery for Legal customers leverage Atlas Compliance Automation services to connect to IBM, EMC, Symantec, file shares, Autonomy and other sources. The SDK allows IT to implement connectors for high volume systems for lower cost compliance.

Achieve Rigorous Discovery and Defensible Disposal
 Atlas Discovery Cost Forecasting is part of the Atlas Information Governance Suite. With both Atlas for Rigorous Discovery and Atlas for Value-Based Retention in place, the world's largest organizations are achieving defensible disposal. With IDC predicting data volume increasing at 50% per year, the legal burden is great than ever, and discovery and data management costs are escalating at a time when enterprises are looking for significant cost reduction. The Atlas Information Governance Suite is the only solution that eliminates unnecessary legal risk, discovery costs and data management expense.