Law Department Management Blog
As reported in InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 18, Oracle’s law department has created an in-house virtual team headed by an e-discovery director. The ranks of legal departments with such teams swell every day (See my posts of Oct.1, 2005: Laura Kibbe and Pfizer; Aug. 26, 2006 #1: initiatives at Verizon, Cendant and Pfizer; Feb. 1, 2006: Verizon and Altria; Nov. 13, 2007: should law departments set up discovery teams; Jan. 28, 2008: Women in E-Discovery group; and April 13, 2008: Eastman Chemical’s discovery team).
One step the Oracle team is taking is to cut back from the many different e-discovery vendors it currently uses to “two or three preferred providers” (See my posts of Feb. 9, 2006: hundreds of discovery vendors at LegalTech; and Feb. 19, 2007: mandates by departments to their firms to use one.). The term “convergence” does not have to be limited to reductions in the number of law firms retained.