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| Case Study: Email Thread Analysis (Analysis Powered Review) |
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| Client Profile |
| The client was one of the most respected and successful companies in the internet commerce business with the annual revenue close to about US $700 million. |
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| Case Background |
The case was related to a breach of contract dispute. The plaintiff alleged breach on many counts re performance and delivery including unjust enrichment.
The client called us at the eleventh hour and we were required to produce documents in discovery within about a week’s time. Approximately 80 GB of data was provided for processing with certain identified search terms. Since the parties had continued relationship for many years, there were thousands of email exchanges evidencing the positions of the parties and whether parties had altered certain terms of the contract due to their discussions post execution of the first contract and before conclusion of second revised contract and further debate about applicability of parol evidence rule to the case facts.
Further complicating the matters was the requirements from the client lawyers to ensure thorough comprehensive collection of data set and to identify set of privilege documents within 3 days of ingestion of data. |
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| Cruz Solution |
Cruz eDiscovery loaded multiple file formats including encase images within a day and processed all data by next day. The data was available for review within 72 hours from the time the client had called us.
The majority of data comprised of emails that were exchanged between many custodians during past five years of relationship amongst the plaintiff and defendants. Cruz platform provided powerful email thread analysis with graphical representations for attorney case teams to quickly review and bookmark the emails or the threads. Also, since the data was hosted on a secured platform with online collaborative culling features, it provided instant ease to different members of the attorney review team to collaborate and review data in real time. The reviewers were able to move the relevant emails/data to the folders based on the requirements and legal issue involved in the case. In other words, reviewers performed legal analysis and review on the hosted platform itself. The email thread analysis was particularly useful, because Cruz provided a valuable ability to identify the missing emails on the thread chart conspicuously without requirement to review the email. This ensured that the collection was comprehensive and nothing material was missed.
The concept search and clustering assisted in speed identification of issues that required privilege analysis and attorneys were able to perform it efficiently since the documents had been pre-sorted based on a broad level search. The task was achieved in 4½ days and gave ample time to the attorneys to perform the quality review before turning over documents in response to discovery requests. |
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| In Conclusion |
All traditional review workflow organizes documents by custodians and assigns reviewers to those document sets. They then have them reviewed document-by-document in a chronological order. This methodology worked when the document sets were small and email was a minor component. Today, document volumes are enormous and growing and email is the primary document type (typically 75% to 80% of ESI).
Using the traditional review workflow on a modern document set results in reviewers seeing documents out of context and under tremendous pressure to make decisions quickly to maintain an acceptable document/hour review rate. The reviewers themselves are typically contract labor with no ongoing relationship or stake in the case. The end result is high error rates and high costs. In fact, reviewer decision error rates have been estimated to be as high as 30%.
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