OpenText has announced findings from a new report launched at LegalTech 2020 in conjunction with Ari Kaplan Advisors. The report highlights the need to take control of eDiscovery costs, with AI, cloud and security all listed as top priorities for enterprise legal departments.

“To gain advantage in litigations, successfully conclude investigations, and competently deal with regulatory matters, decision-makers must be able to cull germane information in real-time,” said Serge Savchenko, Vice President, Legal Technology at OpenText. “The demand for speed – amid escalating risks and ever-growing amounts of data – is pushing legal departments and law firms to automate routine tasks and inject machine learning and AI into daily operations.”

The key findings from the OpenText 4th Annual Survey of Legal Operations Professionals included:

Controlling eDiscovery costs is the ultimate goal

Legal operations teams are focused on controlling eDiscovery costs by gaining transparency from law firms on discovery budgets and review efficiency, centralising eDiscovery management, benchmarking success and partnering with managed review providers. Corporate legal teams are standardising their internal process for eDiscovery, and even providing mandates to external counsel. 77 percent contract directly with eDiscovery vendors, 74 percent control which eDiscovery vendors their outside counsel uses, and 71 percent have adopted a centralised approach to managing eDiscovery data. A full 42 percent have adopted a single-vendor model.

Increasing use and spend on AI tools

The drive to improve eDiscovery efficiency, spend and outcomes is fueling AI spending and usage. 83 percent of respondents plan to increase spend in this area and 49 percent reported using predictive coding (also known as technology-assisted review) in the past year (+18 YoY).

Moving to the cloud is a key initiative to optimise operations

69 percent of legal operations professionals saying their law departments are standardising in the cloud.

Data security is top-of-mind

94 percent (+3% YoY) of respondents reported they have data security concerns around distributing electronically stored information to multiple discovery vendors and law firms.