A law department can draw on a law firm that has combined several service providers into an integrated e-discovery team

This blog tries not to market particular offerings of services or products, but this post cites one to describe an approach that law departments ought to know about. A glossy of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman describes PEARL™ — Pillsbury’s E-Discovery Alliance of Resource Leaders. The firm has strategic alliances with ACT Litigation Services, Discovery Services LLC, Integreon, Ji2, Protiviti and TransPerfect Legal Solutions. PEARL combines these firms’ capabilities with Pillsbury’s and offers clients what it calls integrated, unit-pricing on electronic discoverey.

I have no knowledge of how effectively this ensemble plays together, how qualified any of them are, or whether indeed this is a novel offering. I do suspect that law department litigators might like to sign on for a single-source, single-price package. In the complicated world of e-discovery, where finger pointing and jostling and coordination among vendors creates nightmares, this approach might be attractive. It might inspire law departments to push their favored litigation firm to assemble complementary talent in a similar fashion.