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Case Study: Midwest Law Firm

Learn how we helped a law firm reduce eDiscovery time and costs.

About the customer

This Midwest real estate law firm with more than three dozen attorneys working under one roof is dedicated to applying a fresh perspective to the range of cases they handle and clients they serve. While litigation is one of their core competences, their strength is in resolving pre-litigation matters out of court. It's rare for them to sort through boxes of documents or discover electronic files in order to make their case.

To perform the work in-house using traditional linear review methods, it would have taken a team of 100 attorneys and their support staff two to three years to get through the 15.5 million documents.

Challenge

The law firm had a case involving a dispute between two longtime, local real estate business partners that required culling through millions of electronic documents spanning 30 years. However, their lack of eDiscovery expertise and in-house review capabilities meant they might have to hand the case to another firm — forfeiting millions of dollars in billable hours. Tension was in the air as the firm considered the financial implications and what it would mean to walk away from a case of this significance. They also faced an extremely tight 20-day deadline to produce results.

Solution

Ricoh was onsite to evaluate the first shipment of boxes relevant to the case. After thorough analysis, our team presented the firm's attorney with another option — outsource eDiscovery and document review to a trusted partner.

The firm had worked with Ricoh for paper scanning and imaging services. They were thrilled to learn that our services would allow them to retain the case, speed up document review and significantly reduce costs. We proceeded to:

  • Unpack the data collection, revealing 4.5 Terabytes of data with 15.5 million documents.

  • Cull down the documents by quickly identifying and removing junk files and running de-duplication.

  • Provide the data collection to our Managed Review Services team, who furthered reduced the documents down to 770,000 using keyword filtering and systematic adjustments.

  • Load new data population into a predictive coding technology.

  • Significantly reduce the documents that needed to be reviewed for privilege or couldn't be categorized.

Result

The law firm eliminated 98 percent of the original data collection, reducing the documents that required eyes-on review from 15.5 million down to 330,014 documents. As a result, they were able to retain the case and save significant costs for their client. They also now have the means to manage large-scale litigations — without requiring a huge investment in additional personnel and technology.

They also finished their review five hours ahead of the deadline. And the quality control rate was an exceptional 17.9 percent across the entire reviewed population — far exceeding the industry standard of 7 to 8 percent.

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