Truly Effective EDD Requires Innovative Thinking
The Issue: Unusual Culling Parameters Require Unusual Methods
After enjoying a mutually rewarding partnership with Altep for several years, a large law firm approached the Altep EDD team with an unusual project. Although the volume of data was not particularly large – some 77 GB of mixed e-files and e-mail messages with attachments – the client was extremely motivated to cull the dataset as thoroughly as possible, so that only data that was very likely to be responsive would be left to review.
The Solution: Custom Processing and Utilities
In a series of meetings, conference calls and iterative test-runs, Altep worked with the client to develop a culling method that would produce the desired results. To support the process, Altep R&D created a customized software utility that could automate the desired date range searches. The culling criteria involved a three-pronged approach:
a. Use a general set of search terms for “first pass” culling of the entire population.
b. Run a date range search against the entire population, and then cull the result set with a different, more specific set of keywords.
c. Run a second date range search, and cull the results with a third set of keywords.
The process yielded three separate sets of data, which were then de-duplicated and loaded into Inspicio(R), Altep's web-based document review platform.
The Impact: Cost-Saving Approach is Now Available
Altep’s EDD and R&D teams have since expanded the software and methodology employed in this project, and made it available to other clients with similar culling and data management goals. The innovation has afforded Altep’s clients significant cost savings in both processing and review.