Collections

Electronic Discovery begins at collections.  This step determines the scope, number of custodians, and how the information will be gathered.  Emphasis is placed on the process itself: how the information is gathered, from where, by whom, and what that information is.  It is more prudent to gather more information than is needed and filter it later, than to not gather enough information and have to perform additional collections.

Culling and Processing

The collected documents, or the corpus, will need to be culled, based on the scope of the litigation and the information needing to be reviewed.  Date range, document type, duplicate information, and keywords are a few of the methods used to reduce the corpus. At this stage the goal is to reduce the corpus down to a manageable size before human effort is expended. 

The next step is to prepare the documents for a database review.  Different tools have varying capabilities.  Nor are cases identical, or the information required for them.  As a result, processing will vary.  In some cases, processing may occur all at one time and everything will be converted into its final production form of TIFF images.  In other cases, the corpus will only go through light processing to make the native files suitable for review. 

Review

There are a number of ways and tools that can be used to review the corpus.  Paper, TIFF, database, and native documents are all examples of forms in which a review can take place.  Over a given case, the process you use will likely incorporate all of these forms.   Information needs to be portable, and in most cases that will require good planning and consensus with all involved.

The goal of this step is to reduce the corpus down to the set of documents you are going to produce and use in the case.  Without proper planning, this step can be lengthy and costly.  There are a number of strategies that can be used to reduce both.

Production

With the corpus down to relevant documents, it is now time to produce them to the opposing counsel.  Typically both sides have agreed upon their exchange methodologies during the discovery planning process.  These include paper, TIFF or PDF images with a database of metadata.  In  increasingly more cases, parties are exchanging data in native form or in native with metadata extracted. 

For more information, please feel free to contact us or ask us a question.