Case Study: Law Firm

How Ricoh eDiscovery and Relativity® Assisted Review made unwieldy data volumes manageable.

About the customer

A law firm headquartered inside the Capital Beltway in Washington, DC, had seen their fair share of complicated cases. Focusing on banking, privacy and financial services law, they have provided legal services to local, national and international clients from offices across the U.S. for nearly two decades.

By partnering with Ricoh eDiscovery, the firm produced all relevant information for the case with speed and accuracy, at a fraction of the cost.

Challenge

A government fraud investigation required producing data within a month and the expected "small" collection quickly grew to 33,000 electronic documents. The data consisted of mostly email and attachments, and there was no way to determine relevance without reading every single document. One attorney at the firm was in charge of culling and reviewing all the data—with no other internal resources available and no budget to hire contract attorneys.

Solution

The firm had never utilized Ricoh's eDiscovery services. That was about to change. Ricoh, with guidance from the firm, dove into the electronic documents to determine what was relevant to the case—and substantially cull down the number of documents to a manageable amount for review.

We presented a number of solutions proven to help other law firms face growing volumes of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). In the end, Relativity® and Relativity® Assisted Review was the most effective option. With this robust solution hosted within Ricoh's Microsoft Azure™ cloud, we were able to:

Provide a secure login so the attorney could review the ESI anywhere, anytime.
Handle all of the back-end administrative work, subjective analysis and document uploading.
Index all the data so it could be analyzed, searched and reviewed.
Filter based on keyword, data, file type and de-duplication.
Code documents as responsive or non-responsive—allowing the software to identify potentially relevant documents among the remaining data.
Confirm or overturn analytical decisions Relativity made in the early stages of the project.
Run an extensive list of terms and phrases to identify privileged information.
Segregate privileged information so Ricoh and the attorney could safely produce the remaining electronic files.

Result

Working closely with the attorney as the subject matter expert on the case, Ricoh confidently reduced the original collection of 33,000 down to a far more manageable batch of 7,700 relevant documents—resulting in a quicker review cycle.

The attorney only had to manually review 3,000 documents—those that were privileged, and those that couldn't be categorized as they were image-based or did not contain enough text to be indexed.

The time and cost savings for the firm was monumental. On his own, it would have taken the attorney approximately four months and cost the firm about $68,000 in billable time to review all the initial documents provided. Through the Ricoh eDiscovery partnership, he met the deadline and saved $52,000 in manual review costs.

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