eDiscovery Myth: Large matters require large review teams
Truth: Automated workflows can cut staffing needs drastically while adhering to tight deadlines
When complicated cases arise, often featuring overwhelming amounts of data, it’s common to panic and then staff as many seats as possible with reviewers to tackle the large volume of documents. However, if costs are top of mind and time is of the essence, this is not the best approach. In fact, with today’s technologies, you more often need fewer people on any given case than ever before. A highly skilled eDiscovery review team, like Dauntless, will provide the level of detail, quality, and timeline you need by using data reduction strategies and smart workflows through technology and subject matter experts.
Simply Put: You do not need more reviewers; you just need a more effective review process.
So, which factors drastically cut down the number of people needed to complete a document review from start to finish? Technology, workflows, and experts well-versed in both.
Acronyms are the name of the game here. ECA, or early case assessment, is the overarching method to cut downtime, expenses, and labor for larger matters. TAR, or technology-assisted review, is a method that takes much of the burden from human to computer after the ECA process. TAR 2.0 is now actually called Continuous Active Learning, or CAL.
Now that we have that laid out, we can dive a little deeper.
ECA can provide a wealth of knowledge before ever reading a document, such as insight into the key players in a case, the topics within the material, the potentially non-relevant population, and more. Properly employing ECA builds a foundation for a case by allowing the data to guide how to best tackle the volume. At that point, you may decide to offload to a team like Dauntless leveraging a platform like RelativityOne.
When reviewing documents, either in-house or by a third party, you are looking to do several things. Among the first is to understand and organize the collected data, then build prioritization for how the documents will be reviewed and suppress any non-relevant data. Often, this is done through sorting data with a variety of analytics, including statistical, textual, visual, and relationship analytics.
Technology Assisted Review can drastically reduce the workload for your employees and increase document decisions per hour. In the past, a ‘seed set’ was needed to teach the platform criteria to determine responsiveness. This process was done multiple times, with humans reviewing recall at each step and adding to the machine to increase accuracy.
Now that the industry has progressed to CAL, seed sets are unnecessary. The technology used for review learns as the documents are being processed, thus reducing the initial learning phase of the process. This process allows computers to tackle the bulk of the information and deem it unrelated to the case at hand, so your team only needs to focus on what is responsive and relevant, thus cutting total review time down drastically.
So How Do You Organize Your Workflows for the Fastest and Most Accurate Review?
Choose Technology Platform and Approach
When dealing with large document volumes, it may be tempting to load everything to a review database and start a linear review, document-by-document, before diving into analytics-based assessments. This will be costly and often can waste valuable time. Using CAL can jump-start a review, prioritize highly responsive concepts, ensure consistent decisions and sideline documents that need a manual approach. The time saved in utilizing modern workflows, or more in-depth interviews with custodians could support your case further. While the issues and the data will be unique in every case, leveraging technology will allow you to find and focus on the critical documents
Assign Review Team
Providers like Dauntless will create review teams with subject matter experts so you can rest assured case data is being reviewed by highly skilled, review-trained attorneys, all while requiring fewer people. Having a team of reviewers independent of your own will increase the document decisions per hour and give a higher accuracy rate, giving you better results and a fraction of the time.
Now that you’ve outlined your workflows and decided what technology to use, you will notice that you need a far smaller team than you expected. But if taking the time to run your ECA or set up your CAL review seems daunting, it may be time to outsource to a team of experts.
Dauntless Discovery uses proven techniques, workflows, and technologies that successfully reduce errors, expedite review timelines, and minimize overall costs.
Verdict: Large Matters need a better use of automation and smart workflows, not a larger review team.