Digital White Papers

LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT 24 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER An Australian Perspective on Avoiding Hidden E-Discovery Costs knowing key information was already received. If a person's name or company number pops up, it might immediately ring a bell for the lawyers but not necessarily for the LTS member. In the traditional model, legal teams dra a search plan that LTS staff translate into search queries. Once the legal team gets the results, they modify the search plan and send it to LTS for search iteration two. And iteration three, etc. The first few rounds always need to be further refined because no one can dra the perfect search plan without knowing how the data will respond to the searches. This back and forth between the legal team and LTS can take days. It would be much more efficient to have a litigator sit down with an LTS member at the ECA stage and run a few searches to see the results. Once everyone has a beer understanding of the data, they will be closer to creating the perfect search plan, and hidden costs will be avoided. review begins, not aer, with some analysis happening even before processing so filters can be applied. It might seem daunting to trade valuable (and billable!) review time for additional analysis, but every minute we spend on preliminary analysis could saves hours or days of document review work later –– a savings that ultimately goes to clients. A combination of date and keyword searches, content extraction analysis, near deduplication, email threading and social network analysis are all available to help us locate documents for priority review. I once worked on an investigatory maer with two terabytes of data (about 20 million documents) collected in the initial stages. Using a combined analysis of date, keyword, social network and email threading, we found fewer than 50,000 key documents to be reviewed. This first round of review built up the framework of legal arguments for the team without us having to look through all 20 million documents. Legal teams frequently ask whether they might spend time and resources on ECA and still not locate key documents or whether the LTS team might miss key documents during analysis. It is this uneasiness that can lead to the incursion of hidden costs during the ECA process, but this fear can be allayed with the involvement of the lawyers. In fact, lawyers' involvement is crucial to identifying relevant documents efficiently. The best approach can be designed only when the legal team works closely with the LTS team so available tools can be tailored to the maer at hand. Lawyers sit with clients and receive correspondences that LTS staff do not see. If the lawyers are not involved in the ECA process, LTS might spend days doing required searches and analysis without The Effects of Culling INITIAL STAGE 20 million documents AFTER CULLING 50,000 documents Native processing and rendered PDF processing costs can differ by around $200 per GB. For one TB of data, the cost difference can be between $80,000 and $200,000.

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