Dan Regard on project management in electronic discovery

July 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dan Regard is an e-discovery veteran with over 20 years of experience in consulting to legal and corporate entities. After stints at Deloitte, FTI Consulting and LECG, he and Neal Lawson co-founded Arlington-based Intelligent Discovery Solutions, Inc.

I recently spoke to Dan to get his opinion on the state of the e-discovery industry. Due to the many different players in the e-discovery arena, one of the biggest challenges is coordinating the different firms and tools promoted by those firms to produce a repeatable, sustainable process. The problem is constant reinvention of the same wheel. The lack of a repeatable process means that the process can’t be measured, meaningful metrics can’t be developed, and the process cannot be improved.

The recent anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission sheds some light on the solution. Despite the fact that the computers available to NASA at the time had a fraction of the power of today’s laptops (the computers within the command module itself had less power than an ordinary cell phone), the many complex systems had a failure rate of less than .01 percent. The key to the success of the space program was superior management.

Project management is likewise the key to success in e-discovery. Project management facilitates the coordination of the many parties involved, promotes communication between those parties, allows a record of the process to be created, and promotes discipline throughout the process. Project management fosters the creation of a repeatable process, and is an essential requirement for a successful e-discovery outcome.

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