“Through the networking and relationships in the space we’ve built up over the years, I seem to get a fair number of calls with folks who are in a bad situation. Maybe a smaller law firm with no Database Administrator. Sometimes a larger eDiscovery service provider hosting data with system administrators wearing the “DBA Hat”. The worst of those calls are when someone has experienced SQL Server corruption or unexpected downtime and they aren’t sure what to do to recover, why it happened or how to get at the root cause. It seems like there is always a deadline looming, too. Most judges don’t seem to understand “the server ate our production” as an excuse, either.”
I’ve seen this myself in the time I’ve worked for software companies. A lot of law firms, especially, try to kind of get by without the proper staffing to support the tools they want to use. They want to keep things in house instead of spending the money on managed services, and they want to newest and coolest technology, but having that stuff in house requires someone to maintain it.
These aren’t the days when a tech-savvy legal support person or junior IT person could keep things running. If you’re going with a SQL, or ElasticSearch backend to your litigation technology, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, and when they go wrong, even great support folks from the software company are not going to be able to fix everything if standard backups and maintenance hasn’t been done on the databases.
So if you want the latest, greatest, tools, be sure to include a plan, and resources, to support it!
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