Home
/ Insights
/ Articles
/ Why Multi-Party Litigation Demands Unified E-Discovery

Why Multi-Party Litigation Demands Unified E-Discovery

Large Volumes of Data and Global Scope Often Complicate Standard Workflows

Chief legal officers and general counsel around the world have reported that their organizations are experiencing an increased volume of litigation, alongside rising costs and challenges.¹ In this environment, multi-party disputes — cases that often involve large volumes of disparate digital evidence, global teams and high-stake outcomes — are not uncommon. When these matters span across borders or involve multiple regulatory agencies, additional difficulties arise under varying privacy laws, document languages and the availability of local expertise.²

The evolving volume and variety of data sources add further complexities to conducting complete and defensible data collection during multi-party litigation. Cloud and emerging data sources require unique workflows to address and traditional e-discovery tools are not always capable of extracting and preserving such material without custom workarounds.³

Despite these compounding issues, many legal teams remain reliant on e-discovery workflows that may not offer optimal performance and defensibility in high-stakes, complex matters. The use of overlapping, disconnected, inconsistent workflows and teams can restrict cost and process optimisation and introduce unnecessary risk across the discovery, disclosure and presentation lifecycle. Applying approaches and discovery experts that can deliver consistent guidance and processes for multiple parties throughout every phase can reduce risk, eliminate duplicative work, improve efficiency and contain costs.

The Inefficiencies of Disconnected Teams

In multi-party litigation, it’s common for multiple e-discovery providers, law firms and in-house teams to be involved in the delivery of a disclosure exercise. With so many separate touchpoints across a matter, processes can become cumbersome and inconsistencies creep in. Duplicate data processing, unaligned workflows and the need to move large volumes of data between teams can lead to significant cost increases and inefficiencies that delay timelines. Additionally, this approach increases the risk of cross-version confusion, data gaps, differences in disclosure protocols and errors, while hampering collaboration and communication across legal teams.

Conversely, centralising a matter with a trusted provider that offers holistic and standardised case management for counsel, alongside e-discovery expertise, can significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency. This is particularly evident in complex, multi-party litigations. By consolidating data, aligning workflows and establishing appropriate privacy and ethical walls, legal teams can:

Reduce data processing costs through the management of a single repository of data, from which each party in the litigation may individually extract.
Minimise the time spent sharing data between parties.
Standardise workflows that help to ensure consistency and quality control.
Improve collaboration among all involved, where counsel deems appropriate.
Significantly reduce vendor management time and complexity by centralising the full e-discovery lifecycle within a structured and secure environment.

A modern, end-to-end e-discovery solution should be capable of supporting everything from document ingestion to trial presentation, while maintaining encryption, audit trails and compliance with privacy laws including the General Data Protection Regulation.

With the emergence of advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence, e-discovery experts can also provide solutions including real-time dynamic exhibit presentation and linked transcript navigation. When led by experts, integration of AI into e-discovery workflows enhances the capabilities of traditional systems. For example, AI can improve quality and speed in optical character recognition for handwritten documents or images and translation of multi-language documents. Experienced teams may also use AI to flag inconsistencies or potential hot documents, summarise documents and depositions and help inform case strategy.

A Strategic Advantage With Unified E-Discovery

In recent matters, FTI Consulting’s teams have aligned on designated workflows to ensure that each party benefits from collaboration and shared output. This provides a uniform approach to interrogating data across all parties and allows additional opportunities for cost-saving. Such alignment also reduces ongoing administrative burden on the legal teams when managing cross-party workflows.

Where regulatory expectations are becoming more rigorous and clients face numerous data challenges, modern litigation success requires the ability to combine legal expertise with the right technology foundation. By adopting a unified end-to-end e-discovery approach, legal teams can reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide client value in multi-party litigation cases. With a unified approach, organisations can achieve delivery excellence, where each step of the process is managed with precision and efficiency.

Footnotes:

1: Association of Corporate Counsel, “ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey,” (2025).

2: Webley, Tom, and Steven Cooper, “Cross-border disputes: An introduction to navigating legal issues arising in multi-jurisdictional disputes,” Reed Smith (April 24, 2025).

3: FTI Consulting, “The State of Emerging Data 2025: Tracking a Decade of Data Challenges,” (2025).