Examples of Our Work

Push-Button Document Review Replaces a Costly Stop-and-Go System

A law firm undertaking a large document review effort for a major antitrust lawsuit faced an intractable problem: the opposing party was delivering documents in small collections on an unpredictable schedule. Review teams of attorneys and paralegals had to be assembled, dissolved, and reassembled on short notice or were kept idle for weeks at a time waiting for more documents to review. Costs soared and the training and process management challenges grew. The law firm turned to us for a new document review strategy.

Designing a Streamlined Process

Working closely with the lead attorney, we determined that there was no viable way to ensure a constant and predictable production schedule but that the well-defined case issues were not expected to change. We designed a strategy that would work efficiently within the constraints of the irregular schedule and would also take advantage of the stability of the case issues to leverage economies of scale.

In implementing the new process, our team worked with the lead attorneys to narrowly define the criteria of relevance for each case issue. We then deployed our team of linguists, attorneys, researchers, statisticians, and information retrieval experts to create a solution to automate the relevance assessments.

Smoother Process and Faster Turnaround

Once the process was in place, the law firm would simply send sets of 100,000 to 200,000 pages to us as they received them without having to deploy, train, or manage internal document review resources. Within days, we would return codes for relevant documents in a format compatible with the firm’s case management software. Reports gave our client important case information and ensured that their rigorous accuracy requirements were met.

Extraordinary Outcome

In addition to streamlining our client’s document review with a more efficient and cost-effective process, we:

  • Eliminated the need for an in-house document review team
  • Cut costs and review time by more than 50 percent
  • Reduced the risk of missing relevant information by more than 80 percent
  • Increased by 300 percent the speed at which litigators themselves reviewed relevant documents to make their case

Backed by the pertinent information that we had identified, the law firm attained settlement of more than $700 million for its client.

 

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