Digital White Papers

LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT 26 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER An Australian Perspective on Avoiding Hidden E-Discovery Costs might find that the cost of switching platforms can be recuperated on one large maer in native review. Hidden Costs in Document Review Legal teams oen want to know why they keep seeing the same document when the review sets have already been deduplicated. Deduplication by MD5, a message-digest algorithm, is an accurate way of capturing duplicates, but there is still plenty of room for them to crop up in review: » MD5 duplication only occurs for top-level documents. If an aachment is aached to multiple emails, it will not be de- duplicated. » Sometimes a server or network delay can cause a millisecond or two of time difference between an email retained on the sender's end and that on the receiver's end. When the time stamp is different, MD5 values will be different, and the two email messages will not be deduplicated. » While end-point email messages in a thread oen contain the entire chain of previous emails, each of the individual messages in the thread is different and will not be captured by deduplication. Duplicates and Email Threading The LTS team has traditionally relied on ECA tools for near- duplication or email threading analysis and used fields and/or tags In Auckland Waterfront Development Agency Limited v Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil sought to recover electronic discovery costs incurred with two external providers: $56,858.35 with Provider A and $93,557.92 with Provider B. The High Court of New Zealand found Provider B's costs of $93,557.92 to be fully recoverable and Provider A's costs to be 50 percent recoverable, and subsequently ordered AWD to pay Mobil $121,987.10 for electronic discovery processing costs. Of the seven million documents collected in this matter, 158,000 were fully processed, rendered and imported into Relativity. Nineteen thousand were ultimately discovered, which is only 0.02 percent of the initial data and 12 percent of the processed data. With better early case assessment, 88 percent of the costs for rendering those documents might have been saved for both parties. This case also reveals that courts have no effective way of assessing the reasonableness of e-discovery costs. The High Court determined costs incurred with Provider B to be reasonable because Provider B "appears to have been able to provide a 'discovery database' of the kind that has been made necessary by the new electronic discovery rules." The Court took a broad view without drilling into the billing details to determine what costs could have been saved or what processing tasks were redundant. ILTA A Case Study on Unrecoverable Costs If your document review platform requires extra rendering at the client's expense, it could be time for an upgrade.

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