Employing A "Winning Strategy" For Your International Matters

Year after year, in-house legal teams and outside counsel handling international and cross-border matters are pressured to reduce litigation-associated costs while optimizing each staff member's time and the effectiveness of each dollar spent. 

An influential area to get started is the eDiscovery process and the service providers you partner with…

Managing the cross-border regulatory eDiscovery process and multilingual matters has always been challenging — and to add to it, the exponential growth of electronic data has created mountains of information for legal teams to sift through.

Your foreign language documents can add significantly to the cost, complexity and lead time for your eDiscovery project. Tight budgets and deadlines place additional stress on legal teams already bogged down by the litigation process.

If you are a legal professional working in the litigation arena, multilingual documents unearthed during discovery present unique challenges, and the pure volume of documents alone can be overwhelming.

So, where do you start…?

Usage of Technology in Your eDiscovery Process

Artificial intelligence has drastically benefited the foreign language industry and people's ability to learn and communicate with each other, regardless of their origin or native language. Using tools like Google Translate, while extremely helpful for travelers to read signs and menus, has not reached the level of sophistication to fully comprehend and digest complex Compliance, Pharmaceutical or Manufacturing jargon. 

Utilizing machine translations as the first "pass" for foreign language documents has become a common practice within multilingual litigation due to cost efficiencies and the speed at which they can be produced. The results are heavily reliant on the input, though… While humans can decipher handwritten text or blurred ink, current OCR technology struggles to capture specific characters and a rogue line or earmark can distort the intent of an entire sentence.

Finding a healthy blend of technology usage can best leverage your internal team's expertise… 

Strategizing

While using AI and machine learning technology can increase the efficiencies of your actions, without a clear strategy to handle this documentation, many teams can feel lost within a pile of documents that are not 100% accurate or court-certifiable.

By taking a consultative approach, our dedicated subject matter experts, partnering with highly vetted linguists, streamline the discovery phase. It reduces the time and internal resources needed to review the data and identify the most relevant documentation that may need to be prepared for trial.

By limiting the scope of what needs to be certified and utilizing our foreign language review staff, clients have saved significantly over the course of the matter and have quickly identified critical pieces of evidence, given our team's language and subject matter expertise.

Dos and Don'ts

Usage of AI and other technology can feel like cutting corners. There are times when this is more appropriate than others.

Dos:

• Qualify the data security of your designated partners.
  • Data security is imperative when working on international matters. Ensuring that your partner has your security in mind is critical to ensure no data breach or compliance issue.
• Ensure the background of the individuals reviewing and translating your documentation.
  • While understanding the document's language is a critical step, making sure that they are familiar with the technology and background is a close second step. Without a nuanced background in your subject matter, you may not have the specific knowledge required to understand advanced topics. 
• Understand and outline agreed-upon costs in advance
  • There are few things worse than a large surprise bill… By agreeing to a fee schedule early in the matter, you can increase your team's efficiency by avoiding the need to get pricing approval and negotiating timelines to reduce "rush" fees. 

Don'ts:

• Utilize tools that can make your client's data public
  • While Google Translate can be very useful for day-to-day interactions in foreign languages, you would put the matter and your client at risk by entering sensitive data into these free-to-use platforms as it becomes public information.
• Utilize vendor out of convenience rather than practicality 
  • Convenience can be extremely beneficial when it comes to time constraints, but not utilizing the best resources for each step along the way can lead to back and forth down the line if there are discrepancies or inconsistencies across documentation.

Ideal Results

At the end of these discussions, our clients have achieved a centralized and easily repeatable process backed by an experienced staff dedicated to ensuring friction-free and successful translations every time.

Questel aims to provide visibility into cost, quality, deadlines, and complete control over the process, allowing our client's staff to focus on the matter at hand. 

Questel delivers customized legal translation services based on your case size and budget requirements, utilizing industry-leading technology to ensure accuracy, lower costs and faster turnaround times. Contact us today to get started.

About Questel LegalOps

Questel helps you optimize legal ops responsibilities with the most comprehensive suite of advanced LegalTech Software and Services to enhance workload efficiency and streamline daily tasks. Fully integrating business data across the entire business ecosystem allows legal teams to create simple and efficient work environments, empowering legal to focus on practicing law while legal operations focus on automating processes, reducing costs, and enhancing team performance. Questel provides tech-driven insights based on real-time data to take confident actions.

Joe Geras, Associate Director of Business Development, Morningside, a Questel Company, is responsible for supporting the company’s legal technology solutions and maintaining strong relationships with leading law firms and in-house departments. Joe expertly advises law firms and corporations on best legal translation practices, specifically implementing workflows and technology that reduce cost, improve quality, and accelerate deadlines. He specifically focuses on IP litigation, ITC litigation, international litigation & arbitration, FCPA, M&A, internal corporate communication & interpretation to ensure adequate global communication in the legal marketplace.