Getting the data down to size.
Our client, the defendant in a putative class action case, turned to Entrusted Advisors for help with a massive and burdensome request for production.
Outline:
The Client preserved, collected, and culled its own data and subsequently presented our analytics team with roughly 500 gigabytes of data, or almost a million documents to review. The client retained EA to help further cull the size of the attorney review set. Our team was able to reduce the set size from almost a million documents to less than 80,000 using traditional search term methodology in conjunction with Relativity Analytics, a 90% reduction. It was a respectable data reduction for many, but we didn’t stop there.
Continuous +Defensible Data Reduction
We approach early case assessment with a mindset of defensibility. We do not set our sights on any preconceived number of documents or an arbitrary “finish line”. Instead, we reduce the attorney review set only as much as is safely defensible.
Working from this basic principle, we continued to analyze the 80,000 documents for further reduction opportunities. What we noticed was the review set was inordinately rich in spreadsheets. Deeper analysis of these documents’ family structures showed that they may be redundant with in-house counsel’s own production efforts. After approaching the Client with our observation and confirming that they had already produced such information, we realized that these documents could be defensibly eliminated as duplicative. After the client confirmed as much through null set validation, the review set was effectively reduced from about 80,000 documents to about 12,000 documents. This was an additional 85% reduction for a final cull rate of 99%.
This solution was made possible by our holistic approach to data analysis, and would not have been solved by relying on traditional search term methodology, predictive coding/machine learning, or analytics alone.
Our initial data reduction efforts using traditional methodology took this review from a $1M+ budget to somewhere between $100K and $200K. This represented a significant cost-savings that many clients would have been pleased with. However, we consider data reduction to be an on-going process, and so we identify and present all available options to our clients.
By continuing to press for data reduction options, we ultimately billed our client less than $40,000 (and that included a complete privilege log, extensive custom redactions, and all early case assessment consulting costs). While we cannot guarantee similar results for all matters and data sets, we can provide our clients peace of mind knowing that if there is an available solution to avoid unnecessary review costs, we will find it. That’s our promise.
