ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV

Customer stories

Global corporation

Global corporation meets tight deadlines with high-efficiency review. Company facing federal investigation meets tight deadlines, cuts review costs with ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV Technology-Assisted Review and ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV Managed Services

Challenges

  • Faced federal investigation into alleged price fixing
  • Required to review two million documents in less than four months
  • Needed to protect confidential or proprietary information while finding responsive documents

Results

  • Found 94 percent of relevant documents, looking at very few nonresponsive documents

  • Completed highly responsive collection with changing review criteria

  • Saved ?320,342 (€366,760) in review costs by using ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV technology and review team

Story

This was not a case of finding a needle in a haystack. Rather, a wide range of documents were responsive. A sample of the initial collection suggested that as many as 45 percent of the documents would be responsive. One option was to produce everything, but the client had a significant amount of confidential and proprietary information that it did not want to be inadvertently exposed. Thus, they needed to produce responsive documents, but only responsive documents.

Looking up at buildings.

The ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV review team achieved a remarkable review efficiency and looked at very few nonresponsive documents.


The corporation turned to ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV proprietary technology-assisted review based on continuous active learning (TAR 2.0) and ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV™ Managed Services to find the relevant documents as quickly and efficiently as possible. Overall, the team achieved 94 percent recall, far greater than that required by the courts. It did so having reviewed only 30 percent of the collection, meeting the corporation’s deadline with room to spare. Additionally, review costs remained substantially lower than they would have been with linear review or keyword search.

The managed review team used CAL from the beginning, without the need for a senior lawyer subject matter expert (SME) to review thousands of documents to train the system. Rather, the team got started right away using the responsive documents already identified for initial training with no time to waste.

The measure of a predictive review is how quickly the algorithm can surface relevant documents. ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV TAR 2.0 technology picked up the trail almost immediately.

There were almost 5,000 batches in this review. Each blue line represents the percentage of relevant documents in the batch. In the early stages, the number reached 80 to 90 percent. Reviewers stayed as efficient as possible to keep review costs as low as possible.

When keywords are used to cull documents, reviewers typically have to look at as many as nine nonresponsive documents for each responsive one. That means they are wasting their time for about 90 percent of their review efforts. With ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV TAR 2.0 technology, statistics show the ratio is much narrower, about 2:1, which means the team finishes faster and bills less.

In this case, the team achieved review efficiency of 1.33:1—remarkable efficiency achieved by the combination of the TAR 2.0 engine plus reviewer expertise. In fact, the chart shows batches quickly approached 100 percent responsive and some batches were 100 percent responsive.

The team reviewed 600,000 documents in all and garnered useful results.

The average team member looked at just 133 documents to find 100 responsive ones.


Cost savings

Toward the beginning of the review, the client’s outside counsel conducted a quality control (QC) review of 20 percent of the documents. Seeing the exceptionally high quality of the review, it reduced the QC review to just 2.5 percent. This included review of 35,000 potentially privileged documents and drafting 10,000 entry privilege logs.

Over the course of the review, 15,970 documents were checked by outside counsel and only 848 were changed (95 percent accuracy) and almost all were changed during the first two weeks of the review as ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV used its QC workflow to ensure that coding was aligned with that of outside counsel.

Deadline adherence

The ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV team needed to complete review of 45,431 documents to meet a two week production deadline for the initial set of documents. It met the deadline with no problem, working through two consecutive weekends.

As new due dates arose following the initial production, ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV doubled its team to more than 40 reviewers to meet deadlines.

Change adjustment

The ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV TAR 2.0 algorithm is noise tolerant, which means that coder inconsistencies—and even changes in direction—do not adversely affect it. With CAL, every ranking starts fresh, with no memory of the previous one. That way, if tens of thousands of documents were to be retagged, the next ranking would take it in stride. The same is true as the team refines its search objectives.

Adjustments happened several times in this case as understanding increased. Yet, the team successfully navigated the multiple major changes to the review protocol with no adverse impact on performance.

Also, just three days before the final production deadline, the team was tasked with reviewing contact lists for the 15 most important custodians. It reviewed over 10,000 entries in the short turnaround.

About Global corporation

Company facing federal investigation meets tight deadlines, cuts review costs with ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV Technology-Assisted Review and ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúTV Managed Services.