4. Review Only the Relevant Materials

The biggest expense in large-scale litigation is attorney review time. This is an undisputed fact of life for corporations and corporate counsel. To defray this expense as much as possible, most corporations conduct the initial review of any large document population by engaging the services of contract review attorneys. With clear instructions and a robust review platform (see points 1 and 2), a team of attorneys can “preview” the collection, make straight-forward, first-level privilege calls, and significantly reduce the volume of materials that must be examined by the firm’s associates. Importantly, such teams can be staffed and deployed at a significantly lower rate; as such, this strategy helps to reduce attorney review costs, but ignores the real potential for cost savings: reviewing only the relevant data.

Any attorney that has reviewed a collection comprised of tens or hundreds of thousands of documents has spent valuable time on unnecessary material. The amount of data generated by a large company in a single day could keep its attorneys busy for months. Imagine the challenge of reviewing many years’ accumulation of data – documents and records created and modified hundreds or thousands of employees, and stored in many different locations and many different formats.

The challenge – and the volume – lies in two basic factors. First, a significant portion of the information that was included in the collection will be irrelevant to the litigation at hand. Second, hundreds or even thousands of documents will occur multiple times across the span of the entire population; although relevant, only the original document needs to be reviewed, and the duplicates can be removed. Handling these issues correctly is an intimidating prospect; however, corporations are not without recourse.

Specialized software applications with advanced searching capabilities can assist the organization in discriminating between relevant and irrelevant materials. Additionally, if properly implemented, search queries can give corporate counsel a road map to a positive outcome, by allowing for early assessment. At Altep, we always recommend early assessment of the issues, allegations and key players, as well as segregation of potentially privileged or otherwise crucial documents as soon as possible.

Finally, firms can include the use of “de-duplication” software in their e-discovery programs to cull duplicate copies of relevant documents from the total population. Obviously, the goal is accurate comparison – the more duplicates that can be correctly identified and removed, the better. As mentioned before, any off-the-shelf product can identify duplicate copies of a given file. Altep has augmented this capability with specialized analytical methods that provide more accurate results by checking for duplicate files within compound files, such as .ZIP archives; finding duplicate e-mails within Outlook archive (.PST) files, and even identifying documents that exist as both an e-mail attachment and a stand-alone file. In the past, this enhanced ability has resulted in up to 40% additional reduction of the data population, which translated into literally hundreds of hours of attorney review time saved. Significantly, this technique also prevented different attorneys from reviewing identical documents and making inconsistent privilege and relevance calls.

By taking advantage of available technologies such as these, firms can avoid spending $350 per hour, or even $100 per hour, to have an associate or a contract attorney determine that an email regarding the company picnic is irrelevant. However, for companies that must defend themselves against large-scale actions on a routine basis, having basic de-duplication and searching capabilities is only part of the solution. An experienced litigation support partner can further enhance the corporation’s data management processes by maximizing technical capabilities to create a methodological advantage. Strategic goals such as further reducing the data population, designing a comprehensive litigation road map, planning efficient ways to share litigation resources between corporate and outside counsel, and designing support packets such as deposition and trial prep kits are all areas of expertise for any agile lit support partner.