2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Why Cloud? Why Now? Welcome to the Future of E-discovery AJ Shankar, Everlaw
CCBJ: Why should corporate legal teams consider an in-house e-discovery cloud solution? AJ Shankar: The corporate e-discovery landscape largely depends on outsourcing work to service providers and outside counsel. In the early days of e-discovery, legal professionals would routinely purchase managed seats for review from service providers because of the expertise and infrastructure required to collect, process and host data. Though on-premises software used to dominate the market, the corporate e-discovery landscape now has many cloud players with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, enabling more organizations
AJ Shankar AJ Shankar is the founder and CEO of Everlaw, a cloud-based e-discovery technology company based in Oakland, California. Prior to founding Everlaw, AJ graduated from Harvard with an AB in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
to shift e-discovery operations in-house. There are now cloudbased solutions (which automatically process and spin up review instances) that have alleviated many past pain points with onpremises software. Simply put, the cloud is the future of in-house e-discovery. Cloudbased solutions provide corporate legal teams unsurpassed efficiency, security, collaboration and perhaps most importantly, control over their litigation process. There are various reasons why corporate legal departments should consider bringing e-discovery in-house with a cloud solution. One specific benefit is the efficiency gains from immediate access and availability to documents. Unlike on-premises solutions, teams can access documents without going through a VPN and are not susceptible to local network outages at the office. The cloud has a lot of redundancy, meaning a fallback within the architecture, that allows a business to continue as normal when there are disturbances in IT operations. Additionally, shifting to a cloud-based in-house e-discovery solution allows users to control their data and litigation and reduce security risks in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago. When leveraging a third-party vendor, organizations must 2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | 29
