Melissa Tatham, Zapproved
It’s a story we hear often: the disconnect between corporate legal professionals and those responsible for allocating budget. The legal professionals are in the trenches, creating and carrying out defensible legal processes to ensure that the company is not at risk. Yet, they don’t always feel empowered to advocate for the tools they need, even when having these tools will save time, reduce risk, and even lower the company’s legal spend. One of our customers in manufacturing summarized it well: “The first time you are forced to defend your process in a class-action lawsuit rather than defending the case on the merits, you will be paying for your decision not to have the right software in place.”
Melissa Tatham As the VP of Marketing, Melissa Tatham has helped grow Zapproved into a leading cloud-based software provider for corporate legal teams. She focuses on creating brand experiences that draw from a deep understanding of customers’ challenges to light the way for corporate legal departments to respond to litigation more efficiently, defensibly, and cost-effectively. Melissa has more than 20 years of high-growth B2B software experience and holds a B.S. in Marketing from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
In short, legal professionals get it. They understand the risk of using a manual or outdated process in situations where there’s no room for error. So why is it that time and time again, projects get pushed back, budgets can’t be allocated, and it seems impossible to gain support for critical technology purchases?
Why Invest in In-House Technology? It’s no secret that e-discovery is a significant portion of the corporate legal budget, and it is only going to increase as data volumes increase and data sources diversify. This trend will accelerate as remote or hybrid workplaces become the norm. Legal teams must also factor in the time-cost of administrative tasks around e-discovery, such as sending and managing litigation holds, preservations, data collections, and performing manual e-discovery tasks for small matters that are not typically outsourced, such as internal investigations. Historically, e-discovery tools were not designed with corporate e-discovery use cases in mind and were too complex for most inhouse legal teams to justify the high internal investment in both staff and technology to use it effectively. Outsourcing worked for a long time. Why isn’t it scalable anymore? The pricing model for e-discovery service providers is still primarily 2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | 61
2022 TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
How to Make the Case for E-discovery Software
