Situation

Our law firm client was representing a client before a UK court. We assisted the client to process, review and produced relevant documents in line with an agreed document exchange protocol.

The opposing party had also utilised an eDiscovery review platform and produced their client’s discovery in line with the exchange protocol, approximately 30,000 documents.

Our client needed to review those documents to get across the material quickly but had limited resources and time available to complete the task. The wanted to approach the review of the incoming discovery in the most efficient way possible.

Solution

Our expert team worked with the legal team to develop a series of searches that could be run to uncover documents based on their importance, namely what was important to the case and were not documents already reviewed in the course of preparing their client's discovery.

The most important documents were identified using a combination of near-duplicate and email threading analytics along with sets of keywords, dates, and people. The least important documents were identified as those that were either technical duplicates, visual duplicates or duplicate email conversations compared to those in the client document set. There were several categories of importance based on their response to the search workflow that helped to develop an order of priority.

The searches uncovered only 32 documents of the highest importance, i.e., relevant and not seen before, with over 9,000 as being identified as most likely reviewed in their client's discovery review.

Impact

Our work in running a series of structured searches and batching the results for review in order of priority allowed our client to:

• Identify and review the critical documents first, in some cases assigning these documents to more experienced reviewers or experts

• Reduce the time and fees associated with the review of the incoming discovery, as many documents could be de-prioritised or excluded from the review set

• Begin preparations for pre-trial mediation and trial as they were able to get across the key documents sooner.