Author: Katie Langston | July 15, 2020
eDiscovery Myth: Advanced analytics tools are not necessary or effective for small matters.
Truth: Even small matters can benefit from the effective use of analytics to save money, improve quality, and maximize effectiveness.
There are two kinds of “small” cases. The first is a matter with a small amount of money at issue, but potentially a voluminous collection of potentially relevant information. The second is a matter for which there is limited information available and just not that many documents that need to be sorted and produced. It may seem that bringing in eDiscovery solutions, such as a review platform with full analytics capabilities or an experienced review team, does not make sense in such matters. That is simply not the case.
Turning to the first scenario. You are faced with a large corpus of data – e-mails, e-files, text messages, other media. The amount of money in contention is relatively small. Putting a large team on the documents, performing traditional, linear document review makes no sense. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow the amount at issue to be a factor in potentially limiting discovery’s scope. Still, it is necessary to identify relevant information and provide it to the other side. It may be tempting to dump the whole thing onto opposing counsel; however, this can be fraught with its own sort of peril. It also does not solve the problem of finding that relevant information for your own use. It may also be tempting to try to cobble together a DIY approach which may not be reasonable or defensible.
In the second scenario, you have a smallish data set – something under 10,000 documents. Again, it’s tempting to just throw a small team on this for a quick linear review or even utilize in-house tools to do it yourself. However, that may not be the most cost-effective approach and may not allow you to ensure good quality results. It may also make it difficult to come back later and prepare for depositions or further investigation.
Analytics in the hands of an experienced project manager can be a great solution for both matters. Powerful analytic tools available in eDiscovery platforms can help get to the most important documents quickly or classify documents for production without the need for large teams of attorneys. In some cases, analytics tools may be included in the base price of using the platform, rather than an added expense. New enhanced technologies can apply analytics to even small data sets. Utilizing analytics tools can allow you to quickly identify the most relevant documents, cut down on the universe of documents requiring manual review, ensure coding consistency, and identify potential coding errors caused by human reviewers. They can also assist with tasks such as identifying key players, creating chronologies, or digesting deposition transcripts.
At Dauntless Discovery, we build the use of analytics into all of our workflows. For matters hosted in our RelativityOne environment, the full suite of analytics is available for use at no additional cost to our clients.