An Epiq roadmap to client success

This article was produced in partnership with Epiq Canada

Expertise doesn’t grow overnight. Gaining it requires a significant investment of both time and resources. If building internal expertise in a particular area is essential to your organization’s primary function, it’s an obvious investment. But, when it’s just one aspect of your business, putting the time in to gain expertise can distract key resources from their roles. For law firms, eDiscovery is like that. As essential as it is, it’s only one aspect of managing a case. Partnering with an organization that already has expertise just makes sense. Their expertise becomes your expertise.

Epiq is the leading eDiscovery managed services (EMS) provider in Canada. A global company, Epiq has been a pillar in the Canadian eDiscovery market for ten years, with employees in nearly every province. Their EMS program offers law firms and corporate legal teams’ industry-leading eDiscovery tools and services backed by data security, proven workflows, access to administrative functions, and insightful reporting.

“By partnering with Epiq, clients get access to a program that offers cost predictability, consistency, scalability, and integration with Epiq’s industry-leading technologies,” explains Sricharan Parthasarathy, Director, EMS. “We solve a really big challenge for our clients: keeping up with data, application licensing, platform upgrades, security audits, and their infrastructure needs, all of which are more complicated than ever.” 

“When we're working with our partners, we're an extension of their business. We're not simply a service that they purchase,” explains Tiana Van Dyk, Managing Director of Epiq’s Canadian business. “Casually, I tell clients they should consider us to be ‘just down the hall’, as opposed to a separate entity that they exchange emails with. That helps create a highly collaborative environment, instead of a transactional relationship.”

Because each client is different

Having partnered with a wide range of law firms and corporations, Epiq understands that each client’s needs are different. This means the balance of the partnership—the who does what-- is decided by the clients themselves. “Some cases are large and complex, for which clients may need a platform with strong processing, review, and analytics capability,” says Keith Bedford, Associate Director of Client Services. “On the other hand, some matters are straightforward, and the client requires a simple platform that gets the job done while keeping the cost low.”

Through the “Epiq Choice” program, clients choose applications and services based on their needs, not by binding contracts. Epiq consultants work with clients to understand their project requirements, scope, and scale, and recommend the products and services that best address those parameters most cost-effectively. Access to the applications and services are seamlessly provisioned through our Epiq service cloud which offers a secured SSO connection to a range of products and services.

“We don’t just throw applications and services at our clients; we partner with them to build bespoke workflows to maximize efficiency and consistency,” says Sricharan Parthasarathy. “Migrating cases from one vendor/platform to another can be daunting, but our data migration experts have dealt with pretty much every eDiscovery application out there and are highly skilled to ensure a smooth transition of data to the Epiq data centre.”

Reducing client burden

Of course, not all clients are looking for a permanent home for all their project work. Often, they need assistance with a large review, or they have received too much data and need help to cull the “noise.”

“Epiq’s partnerships with Transactional clients allow our teams to show the client what we’re all about. We utilize our team of project management consultants, and world-class leading technologies, to reduce the burden on the client,” explains Keith Bedford, Associate Director, Client Services. “We often have repeat transactional clients, where we take the relationship one step further by creating a Master Services Agreement (MSA), which provides competitive pricing and simple project initiation for our regular Transactional clients. This makes the process of launching a new project fast and predictable.”

Regardless of size, at the centre of each partnership is an onboarding process and a playbook, which is the roadmap for a successful partnership. “The design of the playbook is an iterative process where Epiq collaborates with our clients to outline the firms’ best practices, standard procedures, and the ultimate outcomes across the majority of projects,” Bedford says. “The playbook is kind of like a bible that we can use to say what exactly our clients want from us. It can be as granular and specific as what the client wants the fields to be named in the hosting platform, and as holistic as describing the client’s workflow, strategy, and even how the client wants their work to feel.”

“We have proven to our clients over and over that our relationship is that of a partnership, where your deadline is our deadline, and, your priorities are our priorities,” says Bedford.