The amount of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that must be produced for litigation continues to increase at ever-growing rates.  Today, one of the most significant challenges faced by corporations and corporate legal departments is how to quickly evaluate a law suit and discern potential risks and strategies.

Conventional methods of document review are becoming antiquated and costly.  Clients and their outside counsel need to control the scope of their document collections and review costs while quickly and accurately determining potential liability and/or case viability. 

As a solution to this issue, eDI provides its Early Case Assessment service.  eDI's Early Case Assessment system facilitates the prioritization of an entire document collection, enabling a more targeted, accurate, and efficient data collection and review. 

Advantages to Early Case Assessment include:

• Reduced collection volumes - Having the ability to eliminate non-relevant documents and easily locate key documents cuts collection volumes by as much as 80%.  Review teams can receive the data up to 10 times faster.
• Rapid assessment of key issue and concepts -The most significant concepts, issues, and custodians are discovered while the data is collected.
• Reduced litigation costs - Refining data collections during an early case assessment to exclude irrelevant documents, dramatically cuts the costs of subsequent document processing and review.

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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

CASE RESULT

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.

Tips and Tricks

Create a detailed Return on Investment (ROI) for using technology to dramatically cut review cost.

Many firms can benefit greatly from Early Case Assessment and dramatically reduce expenses incurred at all phases of litigation.  At eDI we work with firms to assist them with processes to help them rapidly acclimate to their data and use this knowledge to shape the direction of early litigation strategies and Meet and Confers.  However, without a complete ROI and assessment, it may be difficult to quantify this value. Understanding that challenge, eDI has created a Litigation Assessment Program that is designed to help corporations identify exactly how Early Case Assessment could benefit them, and create detailed ROIs around that value.

Helpful Resources for Your Law Firm

Data Sheets

• Firm Brochure
• eManage
• eView
• Quick Peek
• Content Grouping
• SaaS
• Client Testimonials

Resources

• FRCP Cheat Sheet
• Meet & Confer Checklist

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