How we built the discovery industry’s highest-rated services team

In my previous life as an expert consultant at some of the largest ediscovery providers, I spent 95% of my time negotiating with other parties to get what I needed to do my job instead of focusing on what my client was trying to accomplish. Without someone owning the full ediscovery process, too much time was spent on logistics like documenting and accounting for the necessary steps, resulting in a mountain of (unnecessary) billable hours. 

After years of conducting business like this, two things became clear to me. First, taking the time to understand clients’ needs and exactly what they were trying to accomplish was a critical step that was often skipped. And second, even though 

technological advances have sped up much of the ediscovery process, back and forth negotiations and handoffs consistently erased those time savings. 

Finding a way to alleviate this pain is what led me to DISCO. From a technology standpoint, DISCO has eliminated many of those handoffs by giving attorneys the power to complete many of the tasks that required an administrator (like review batching, ingesting and exporting data, or managing user permissions). But even with our intuitive platform, I believe technology cannot be a standalone solution — and in the same regard, neither is a services team being billed by the hour with cookie-cutter data solutions leveraging a Frankenstack. 

Brian Kawasaki, Senior Director, Professional Services, DISCO.

Driven by outcomes, not billable hours

Because every case has its own intricacies, expansive document populations, and sometimes aggressive deadlines, DISCO Professional Services believes that the best outcomes are driven by a deeply personalized level of service. Our flexibility to serve our clients when they need us is the result of a fast, intuitive product and a team of legal technologists who know the importance of understanding the desired outcome. For us, it’s more about assessing all of the options and choosing the one that will get our clients to success faster, rather than just choosing the fastest option. In the past year, we have focused on expanding our culture of consultation so that we get to the heart of every client matter and increase the happiness of everyone involved.

Building the right team, not just staffing the available ones

Unlike other legal services vendors, we are not a staffing agency. Calculating how many people it will take to complete a task is not a formula for client satisfaction or success. Our team begins every new project with a complimentary consultation led by a DISCO and ediscovery subject matter expert to diagnose what our clients need and prescribe a plan that will get our clients to their desired outcome. 

In this consultation, our priority is to understand the desired end result before we begin recommending strategies and tactics that will help them achieve their goals. Perhaps it’s aligning the right resources, such as our in-house forensics team or assigning a PM who has experience with the case type. We may also suggest specific learning modules in DISCO University (our online learning platform) or provide AI and workflow guidance so you can quickly kick-start your review. After the consultation, our clients have a clear and personalized path forward, ensuring transparency on a project and financial level. They often spend a fraction of the cost on professional services compared to traditional service providers.

After the consultation, our clients can customize their path forward. Some choose to offload more of the project to DISCO, while others adapt our approach to meet their working styles with occasional use of our services. Regardless, these initial consultative sessions help us document what our clients want to achieve to keep us laser focused on the end result. More importantly, they enable flexibility, so we are ready if and when our clients need us at any point during their matter.

Less backend babysitting means more time to support you!

If I had to summarize everything DISCO has to offer in one word, it would be speed. Being fast and efficient is at the core of everything we do in both software and services. Our technology eliminates many of the tedious, time-consuming tasks that might otherwise keep our team and our clients from focusing on the end result. These time savings are what empower us to take a more personalized, consultative approach with our clients throughout the matter. 

With features like cross-matter AI, real-time QC, and High-Speed Uploader, our clients can own as much of the ediscovery process as they want — but if you’re doing the heavy lifting, our PMs are happy to make your load lighter! We’re always available to assist with pointers to use the platform better or ad-hoc support. 

While our technology is the bedrock to our services organization, it’s the processes and playbooks that we have developed that take our personalized offering to the next level. DISCO Professional Services is your pre-assembled team of experts. With the full scope of the project always in focus, we stand at the ready. So when a client uncovers 45,000 PDFs of financial statements that not only need to be reviewed, but converted to Excel so they can also run calculations, the answer is not, “We can handle the review but not the collection or reconfiguration,” it’s “OK, let’s get to work!” From forensics preservation and collection to custom complex data solutions, to an in-house managed review team, we are ready to solve your most complex data conundrums.

Happy project managers + happy clients = better results

At the risk of sounding a little corny, our goal in the professional services team is to create one big happy feedback loop. Rather than a strictly transactional relationship, our PMs are excited about and invested in DISCO, which ignites passion for their work that our clients can feel. 

As we continue to build our team to meet our clients growing needs, we are not looking for task masters so we can scale faster. We hire a diverse team of PM experts, and provide opportunities for continuing education so they can stay at the top of their field. These PMs use and become DISCO Certified on our fast and intuitive software (so their jobs are more enjoyable) and have the opportunity to work with our engineering team to keep our platform cutting edge. They are not only improving our clients’ outcomes, but they’re making DISCO better every day. 

Our technology ensures that we are consistently adding real value to deliver on our clients’ vision, and not just helping them finish another project. Whether we provide full managed services, pitch in to meet an aggressive deadline, or develop the right workflows so they continue their own work, we happily meet our clients where they are and get them to where they need to be. When our clients experience the magic that our personalized, outcome-focused approach provides, they know that we’re invested in their (successful) outcome. This is why DISCO Professional Services earned a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 88 (for comparison, Netflix has a NPS of 13), with 83% of respondents ranking us a 10 out of 10. ‍

To learn more about how we can improve your ediscovery happiness, reach out to us at support@csdisco.com.