Your E-Discovery Provider Is Down, Now What?

At the end of 2022, Ricoh eDiscovery went down for nearly a week, leaving its clients without access to their data ahead of trial deadlines. Observers say as cyberthreats grow, clients and providers should prep for outages.

Analysis by Isha Maranthe, Legal Tech News

Your E-Discovery Provider Is Down Now What by Isha Maranthe, Legaltech News
Image: Legaltech News

A few days shy of the new year, legal services provider Ricoh eDiscovery sent out a concerning email to its clients.

“Valued Customer, On December 28, Ricoh learned that there may have been unauthorized access to the domain controller for our eDiscovery Services. In an abundance of caution, and for your protection, we have decided to disable external access while we investigate further,” the email said, according to Above the Law.

The vendor would stay dark for nearly a week thereafter, restoring services on Jan. 4, 2023.

To be sure, Ricoh is not the first e-discovery provider to experience an outage. In February 2020, Epiq Global shut down owing to a ransomware attack, while Fronteo faced a similar fate in March 2022.

[… there are two types of e-discovery providers]: Those that have been breached and those who are targets of potential future breaches.

David Cohen, the chair of records and e-discovery at Reed Smith

While both companies were able to recover, like Ricoh, their clients were left without the capabilities of document review, even as their trial deadlines were potentially approaching.

The possibility of an e-discovery vendor being breached, leaving its clients to fend for themselves until further notice might seem rare. But as cyber incidents show few signs of slowing down, observers note that the situation is likely to become more common than ever.

David Cohen, the chair of records and e-discovery at Reed Smith, noted that there are two types of e-discovery providers: “Those that have been breached and those who are targets of potential future breaches.”

Meaning, “nobody should be complacent about their e-discovery provider,” he added. But still, Cohen said that with increased preparedness, there are ways to both mitigate the impact of a provider’s outage and in some cases, ways to prevent an outage altogether.

How Clients Deal With an Outage

Read the entire analysis, quoting David Cohen, Reed Smith and Mary Mack, CEO at EDRM here.

Author

  • Mary Mack

    Mary Mack is the CEO and Chief Legal Technologist for EDRM. Mary was the co-editor of the Thomson Reuters West Treatise, eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel for 10 years and the co-author of A Process of Illumination: the Practical Guide to Electronic Discovery. She holds the CISSP among her certifications.