Case Study: National Law Firm

• Employed a wide array of Ricoh eDiscovery services and applications to maximize efficiency, minimize time and reduce cost

• Multiple concurrent Active Learning reviews to minimize review time and cost, and start rolling production early

The eDiscovery process from collections through production was managed with Ricoh’s Intelligent eDiscovery solutions. For both phases of discovery, the Remlox™ Remote ESI Collection devices enabled the law firm to target and collect the relevant files from workstations and network servers remotely in a user-friendly and forensically defensible way. Collected data was then reduced by culling by date, file type, and search terms before globally deduping and processing. Once the processed data was loaded into Relativity, email threading was performed and multiple search term reports were crafted to identify the most potentially responsive files for review.

For the government's initial "quick peek" phase review, a  Relativity Active Learning project was created. It was comprised of only the most inclusive email and electronic file search hits and allowed the review of data to begin immediately. In addition to reviewing for responsiveness, the data was reviewed for privilege and any documents that required redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) were tagged. Responsive privileged families were then batched out for the law firm attorneys to redact and generate a privileged log.

A separate Ricoh Managed Review Services team reviewed non-privileged, responsive documents to redact for PII and provide samples before production. By conducting these three reviews simultaneously and manually reviewing a small percentage using the Active Learning technology, production was able to be rolled out within a few days from the start of the review and completed quickly.

Most documents in both reviews contained PII for at least one individual, if not thousands. A Milyli’s Blackout Application’s auto-redaction feature was used to redact all social security numbers, as well as potential birth dates. This automated process of applying redactions saved hundreds of reviewer hours and greatly reduced the possibility of human oversight. Blackout also saved the team from having to redact Excel file images, allowing reviewers to redact native Excel files in the viewer and perform external redaction on Excel files too large to view in the Relativity’s viewer. Native Excel redaction enabled reviewers to redact entire columns, rows, and worksheets with one click. PII redaction consumed the greatest number of reviewer hours. Therefore, using Blackout's features greatly expedited the process and helped the team identify extremely sensitive PII with far greater certainty.

In the Second Request, data was collected from a much larger number of custodians and an expanded discovery request was received, requiring the review of non-responsive documents from the first phase. The Remlox™ devices were dispatched directly to custodians to collect data from workstations. The devices were also sent to the client firm's IT department to collect from the network server. Then, the data was processed and loaded on a rolling basis as it was received. From there, the data continued to be culled through deduping, email threading  and applying search, date, and file type filters. The data was further reduced through a series of text and metadata searches.

Once the new 1.6TB data set was received, processed, and culled, it was loaded into the existing Active Learning project—which immediately ranked all new documents for responsiveness. After calculating recall and precision from samples to determine the rank accuracy, three concurrent reviews were conducted. Law firm attorneys conducted a privilege review of the new documents ranked responsive while the Managed Review Services team redacted responsive documents for PII to expedite rolling productions. A second Active Learning project was also created to load all documents ranked non-responsive to review for the new document request. After reviewing 10% of the data set, the review was concluded and responsive documents from the second project were flowed into the privilege review.

All in all, the complex and sensitive multi-phase eDiscovery process was streamlined and expedited by making the best use of a wide variety of service offerings and tools. Combined with an innovative, customized and dynamic approach, multiple concurrent reviews were able to be conducted amid tight timelines. By integrating conceptual analytics and automated processes with strategic manual review, the law firm saved its attorneys hundreds of hours of document review and redaction—while providing a much higher level of certainty than a full manual review.