Situation

Our client was assisting a plaintiff group with a class action in the Supreme Court of Victoria. The plaintiff group was large, with several sophisticated stakeholders involved. Those stakeholders highlighted that significant data sets might be provided for review but in tranches over an extended period, as data was identified and collected by existing and new stakeholders.

The matter was funded, and the funder wanted to ensure that steps were taken to efficiently manage the large volume of data and rolling method of delivery.

Solution

Our team worked with the legal team to set up an early case assessment (ECA) workspace alongside a separate review workspace. Every time a tranche of new data was received, it would be uploaded to the ECA workspace, where it would be de-duplicated against existing data. The legal team would conduct searches with and without our assistance to identify potential documents to be promoted to the review workspace for more detailed interrogation and review. Over 12 months, we had processed and hosted over 1.75 million papers in the ECA workspace, but only approximately 85,000 copies had been promoted to the review workspace.

The ECA workspace the legal team with an accurate and defensible method of searching and reducing review volumes (compared to running those searches in a less sophisticated platform). It also allowed the legal team to return to the ECA workspace to run further searches as the parameters of the matter changed over time. Due to the integrated nature of the workspaces, it was swift and easy to promote data to the review workspace when needed.

Impact

Our work in establishing this ECA review workflow allowed our client to:

• Accurately conduct initial searches over large sets of data to identify the more potentially relevant documents and reduce the review burden on the legal team

• Quickly and cost-effectively return to the primary data set and run different searches as the matter and its scope evolved

• Minimise ongoing hosting fees, as the ECA workspace is charged at a reduced rate compared to the review workspace. Due to the comparatively small amount of data hosted in review as compared to the ECA workspace, this saving was considerable.