Managing the Total Cost of Review

Review is the most expensive part of e-discovery: statistics range from 60% to 80% or more of the cost. This is due to volume, complexity, and the hourly cost of attorneys reading hundreds of thousands of documents.

Reducing the cost of review by using lower-cost reviewers is a poor option. For one, they are usually less qualified: offshore reviewers aren't well-versed in US regulations, there may be language issues, and junior reviewers are less experienced. Cases such as Qualcomm v Broadcom illustrate the pitfall of relying on low-cost reviewers. Sanctions were applied when relevant documents were not produced, the judge commenting that a "senior attorney should have supervised junior reviewers." For another, sheer volume can outstrip per-hour savings. An "average case" can easily include a million emails.

Reducing the size of the collection of documents to be reviewed is another option, but it too has challenges. Most culling tools rely on identifying duplicate and nearly duplicate documents and allow documents to be batch-culled. The challenge is that employing these tools early in the process also means deploying them before the real tenets of the case are understood. If you cull documents before you know what the real case issues are, you may inadvertently eliminate relevant documents.

Analytics offers a better option for managing review costs without endangering review quality.

This is where Content Analyst's CAAT comes in

CAAT technology derives conceptual meaning from documents and text, and then uses that to find all other similar concepts in a given collection of documents. This enables it to "understand" the documents collected for a particular case in terms of what they contain, and not just the keywords they use. The downstream benefits are significant for early case assessment, first pass review, document coding, privilege review, and quality control prior to final production.

Deployed as part of the review platforms built by our partners, the indexing and processing that CAAT does is typically bundled into the overall cost to process and host the case. This enables law firms and clients to better manage the total cost of review while maintaining the necessary quality and thoroughness.

CAAT enables law firms and clients to efficiently and cost-effectively:

Assign the most challenging documents to experienced reviewers
Intelligently cull and segregate documents from the collection based on how they relate to the whole case
Group documents for review based on content, not metadata (such as custodian, date range, etc.) to support a Focused Review that results in a 2x to 3x improvement in overall review speeds
Identify key issues and locate relevant, sometimes hidden documents, early in the process, and
Maintain settlement readiness if the case doesn't complete its cycle through the courts (and over 95% of cases are settled before they reach the bench).