In a recent case, our client faced the daunting challenge of reviewing a staggering 4.4 million documents within a limited time frame. The sheer volume of data presented significant challenges regarding time, cost, and the risk of missing crucial information.
The Challenge: Reducing Data for Manual Review
The client was able to reduce the volume from 4.4 million documents to under 900,000, representing a near 80% cull rate. Leveraging Repario’s expertise, the client was able to reduce that volume by 95%, decreasing the document count to less than 50,000. This additional culling left a volume of documents 98% smaller than the starting population and was accomplished in under five hours of consulting time.
The client encountered several hurdles in this case.
- The enormity of the data made manual review impractical within the given timeline, and the client sought to minimize the cost associated with reviewing such an extensive volume while still ensuring that no important documents were overlooked
- The client’s litigation group utilized traditional data reduction methods and conducted multiple rounds of search term refinement yet were still left with nearly 900,000 records in the review set
Our Solution: Data Reduction Consulting
To address these challenges, Repario adopted a consultative approach, collaborating closely with the client’s litigation group to devise strategies that instilled confidence in the reduction techniques. The initial step involved objectively evaluating the existing search term approach, allowing Repario’s experienced team to make minor grammatical and search string operator modifications to optimize results before presenting them to the client.
Next, Repario provided a set of recommendations, engaging in interactive screen sharing sessions with the client to elucidate the rationale behind specific term modifications and their anticipated impact on result improvement. This collaborative approach enabled Repario to understand the client’s priorities and align the modifications with the requirements of the discovery request. Following another round of search term application, Repario’s team embraced a more granular approach, leveraging analytics and optimizing workflow efficiency.
To finalize the approach, the consultant conducted a comprehensive session with the client’s eDiscovery team, meticulously walking them through the proposed modifications and workflow strategies designed to minimize the number of documents necessitating a manual review. By ensuring the client’s comfort in implementing these strategies, a mutually agreed upon approach was established and documented for the client’s formal approval. The full process took less than 3 business days so the client was able to quickly prioritize the remaining review volume.
The Results: Reduced Reviewable Documents
By effectively utilizing these tools and techniques, Repario successfully reduced the count of reviewable documents from over 4 million to less than 50,000. The initial search terms developed through iterative application by the client’s litigation group reduced the set to around 900,000 records. Repario’s subsequent rounds of objective modifications to search terms brought the dataset down to approximately 425,000 records.
Follow-up discussions with the client further helped Repario refine the terms subjectively, resulting in a reduction to approximately 220,000 records. Employing the granular consulting approach, this volume was further reduced to approximately 48,000 records, with many of them being eligible for mass coding.
The achievement not only delivered significant cost and time savings for the client but also alleviated the mental burden on the litigation group while upholding the thoroughness and defensibility of the approach. The Repario consulting team was also able to deliver a detailed audit of our methodology along with a letter for the opposing party if there was any push back on the data reduction.
These documents were final versions prepared by licensed attorneys that could be easily delivered either to the presiding judge, arbitrator, or opposing party. This final follow-up step significantly reduced the burden of preparing defensibility arguments that might have been required of the client.
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