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the most relevant and responsive documenta-
tion by asking a few short questions, such as:
Where do you typically save documents relating
to employees?
Do you keep special email folders relating to
employees?
Do you save documents on your hard drive?
Are there any terms or keywords that you use to
identify John Doe, other than his name?
once you have answers to these questions,
you can use targeted searching to collect the
relevant documents. For example, if the answer
to Question 2 was yes, then, instead of collecting
all of Jane’s emails—which could total thousands
of documents—you can collect only the folder
that contains documents relating to the employ-
ee. By using this simple method, you should
be able to reduce the data set by more than
90 percent.
of course, any collection or search term to
be used should be discussed with the opposing
side. By conferring with the other side, you can
save yourself from later discovery disputes
because the collection process was already
agreed upon.
Use Culling and Review Tools
the amount of esi has more than quadrupled
in the last 10 years, creating a need to find ways
to reduce the reviewable set. several approaches
can be taken to minimize significantly both the
amount of data and the overall discovery costs
in this stage.
early Case Assessment (eCA) is the process of
understanding what is in your data set, and per-
forming analysis of the data to reduce the
amount of data for review.
Let’s say Company A has collected a million
pages of documents. in the older models, all of
the documents would be reviewed. However, by
using eCA tools such as Clearwell, Company A’s
discovery expert can find out which documents
are most relevant, who the most frequent custo-
dians are, and the top keywords throughout all
the documents. Additionally, emails from mass
mailers, such as wsJ.com, can be removed from
the corpus.
Following culling the documents using eCA,
Company A only has 200,000 documents to
review. this 80 percent cut is typical when the
culling strategy is used.
Manage Document Review
in the past five years, there has been an
explosion in the market of e-discovery review
software. it is important to understand what the
ultimate strategy of your review is before selecting
the tool. over the past year, Fortune 500
corporations spent billions in document review
alone. document review requires attorneys to
assess and determine a document’s relevance
or responsiveness in regard to the litigation at
issue. if you’ve ever experienced document
review projects, you’ll know that this is the
most expensive phase in discovery.
As former in-house employees responsible
for a Fortune 500 corporation’s discovery
department, update’s team members have
spent countless hours trying to reduce the cost
of litigation; as a result, we’ve created strategies
that have saved millions of dollars a year.
despite the fact that law firms employ people
with the sharpest minds, document review
can be outsourced. in the traditional model,
an army of associates would be assigned to
perform document review and/or manage
the document review process. on its face,
this model makes sense—intelligent attorneys
familiar with the facts of the case read the
documents and make decisions as to relevance
and privilege. However, this scenario can be
extremely costly. A great solution to reducing
the cost is to use discovery vendors who are
experienced in managing reviews.
Referring to the earlier example of Company A,
let’s say that after culling, you have 200,000
potentially responsive documents to review.
instead of having your law firm review the
documents, outsource the review to a
managed review company, which provides
a discovery expert to help your firm prepare
the proper review strategy, assemble a
document review team, monitor the productivity
and accuracy, and make sure that deadlines
are met. outsourcing to a managed review
company is typically 50 percent of the cost of
traditional document review.
the results of these current models speak
for themselves: significant reduction in litigation
time, resources, and cost. As a CFo, you want
predictability in process as well as cost.
Following new models for discovery will allow
you to achieve that goal.
v
Johanny Olmedo,
Update Discovery
Co-Director
Adam Algaze,
Update Discovery
Co-Director
www
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