eDI's Early Case Assessment process enables clients to quickly evaluate the content of their collected data, and proactively reduce subsequent eDiscovery costs.
                                         

CASE STUDY

 A corporation has been made aware that it should reasonably anticipate pending litigation, precipitating its need to conduct an early case assessment to determine the risks and benefits of potentially taking the case to trial.  While initiating an early case assessment, the corporation's legal team wants to make better, faster decisions on legal strategy and tactics based on real-time information about the material in their enterprise system.

The corporation understands that a successful early case assessment, and possibly resolution, is contingent upon conducting a more informed and expedited analysis at the outset of the dispute; the legal team's objective is to understand the dimensions of risk very quickly, without waiting for collection to occur.  To realize this goal, the corporation seeks a solution that will enable them to evaluate the dispute so that an appropriate handling strategy can be formulated, with the intention of reducing or eliminating the dispute as soon and as inexpensively as possible.

THE eDI SOLUTION

To assist the corporation in gaining a clearer understanding of their position on its case, eDI's Early Case Assessment process enables attorney-driven decisions to automatically prioritize the corporation's enterprise data.  Using statistical and self-learning techniques to prioritize documents by relevance facilitates rapid assessment of the key issues and concepts in the pending litigation.

In addition to the automatic prioritization of data, eDI's Keyword Relevancy process creates a high-relevance keyword list, based on expert analysis of a sample set of documents, which is used for further targeting relevant documents.

eDI's Early Case Assessment satisfies the corporation's desire to analyze its data before it is collected, by allowing the legal team to:

• Identify the custodians relevant to the case.
• Identify the subjects and date ranges that will target a highly responsive set.
• Identify the key terms that will return a highly responsive data set, which can potentially eliminate as much as 80% of the non-responsive "false" keyword hits.
• Improve case strategy by analyzing key terms prior to Meet-and-Confer conferences.

By providing the corporation with a high-level view of the entire data corpus, the collection stage is prioritized based on particular custodians, themes or concepts, enabling the corporation's legal team to quickly ascertain not only whether there is a case to answer and how to answer it, but also, in light of the enormous potential costs of eDiscovery, whether answering it is cost- effective.