Veterans Affairs starts search for cloud-based litigation review platform

The Veterans Affairs Department is on the hunt for a new cloud-based platform that can carry out electronic discovery and processing functions that support VA’s overall litigation review efforts.

VA’s offices of the general counsel, plus information and technology, use systems that do not share either a common collection of facts or chain of custody pertaining to documentation for legal matters.

A sources sought notice issued Tuesday describes how VA wants to fix that issue by acquiring a single, integrated, FedRAMP-authorized cloud platform that can handle the entire lifecycle from intake to tracking and reporting.

The department currently operates two separate enterprise applications for its legal function. One is responsible for handling Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act requests, while the second handles more general eDiscovery and litigation review issues.

An accompanying performance work statement describes the operator base for this effort as covering approximately 400 concurrent and 1,900 named users, who handle roughly 120,000 Privacy Act and FOIA requests per year.

Because of that setup, VA says it currently has to deal with duplicative collection and storage of the same records. That results in inconsistent practices and service levels across different VA components.

The request for information describes VA’s ideal platform as one that performs all legal work on the same evidentiary corpus, chain of custody, redaction engine, legal hold registry, audit log and user interface.

In the RFI’s questionnaire, VA is asking respondents to detail how their offering scales to a large federal enterprise and include any detail about current use cases in government.

VA also is seeking explanations on items such as high-level licensing and pricing models, the cloud platform’s tenant architecture and how the offering could help reduce request backlogs.

Responses to the RFI are due by 11 a.m. Eastern time on July 27.