Author: Luke Riddle

Groundhog Day 2022 | Bridging the Gap: Addressing the Need for eDiscovery Staff with Technical Expertise

Acorn’s CEO, Lia Majid, was joined by Miller Johnson’s Director of Information Technology, Joseph Anderson, for this year’s Groundhog Day webinar to discuss the growing need for eDiscovery personnel with technical expertise.

The discussion expanded on how the lack of eDiscovery personnel, along with the increased need for eDiscovery services, has produced significant industry challenges in recent years. When it comes to managing eDiscovery in-house, there is often a lack of personnel whose main function is eDiscovery. As Joseph notes, “We had an eDiscovery practice that consisted of one project manager working on one case professionally, and then we had a handful of paralegals who were working in Relativity and working with the discovery. But not doing it as their main function and goal…that’s not scalable. If you get one big case, then all that time is taken away and there’s no way to expand eDiscovery within the firm.”

Joseph identified a need for strategically leveraging a partnership with an eDiscovery vendor to accelerate and expand eDiscovery in their firm. They initially didn’t have an established process for dealing with vendors and a structured way to put together the documentation and pull in all the relevant information. As Joseph mentions, “There was this idea that we have to get it into Relativity, we have to do the searches, oops we did something wrong. Okay dump everything out and let’s put it back in.” But through their partnership, they were able to establish a standardized process for each case. Now when there is a new case, they move through their standardized process and identify what needs to be produced before putting it into Relativity, avoiding unnecessary rework. With this increased efficiency, their team’s bandwidth was opened and provided more room for scalability.

A large contributor to these standardized processes involved designing a model to their firm’s case needs, especially for smaller cases. Partnering together, we developed a Small Case Solution, allowing them to leverage Relativity for small matters for a flat fee. Utilizing Acorn’s Small Case Solutions, Joseph’s team created a model where they can bring smaller cases into the RelativityOne software and spread this service to other practices within their firm that typically hadn’t leveraged eDiscovery tools. Joseph mentions, “If you told me that General Counsel would use it for a general investigation, or a Real Estate Partner would be using eDiscovery and that we would have 25-30 cases up from 4, I would have thought no way.” Through their partnership, they now can spread eDiscovery across the firm, and offer the right tools at the right time and place.

By using a standardized workflow with a self-service approach, Joseph’s firm was able to take on more work without needing to hire any new eDiscovery talent. With the current landscape of eDiscovery staffing shortages, it is often not feasible for firms to hire a new paralegal each time new cases arise. Investing in talent also presents cost challenges as Joseph notes, “When we brought an individual on, it was only 20 hours a week and we had the ability to scale up. But if we didn’t need 20 hours, we were still paying for it.” Workloads are constantly fluctuating, but with a strategic partnership to help with the ups and downtime in terms of work within the space, they can scale accordingly.

Despite the challenges surrounding access to individuals in the industry with technical expertise, leveraging a strategic partnership allows you to bridge the gap. Working closely with a partner not only offers access to high eDiscovery expertise but helps you create standardized processes, models tailored to your firm’s needs, and leverage powerful tools at the right moments to truly scale and expand your eDiscovery practice. Transforming eDiscovery into a tool can help leverage across more practices and expand your firm’s efficiency and caseload.

View the full 2022 Groundhog Day session here.   

The Benefits of Early Case Assessment in eDiscovery

You may already know that there are alternatives to the “classic” eDiscovery process. One of these alternatives is an Early Case Assessment (ECA). An ECA can be an extremely beneficial first step, allowing you to quickly identify key information and potential evidence at the onset of a legal matter, which can be leveraged to guide case strategy.

With an initial deeper understanding of the data, we can make reasonable considerations of the case’s liability and projected costs and consider if this case is worth going to trial or if a settlement is an appropriate option. Not only can this approach help guide your initial case strategy but is a cost-effective option leading up to Discovery, allowing us to refine our scope and define and refine our key custodians, key words, etc.  

What Is Early Case Assessment?

There’s no doubt that the early phases of Discovery are the most critical. By using an ECA workflow in the initial phases of Discovery, you can refine vast volumes of data and extract the key facts of your case immediately for review before committing to hosting your entire dataset and the associated costs that come along with that. By refining and analyzing your dataset, we can make reasonable, cost-effective considerations of the case’s liability and projected costs and consider if this case is worth going to trial or if a settlement is an appropriate option. Costs can be significantly reduced by analyzing a smaller subset of data initially, rather than going through an entire collection of all your data only to find out that you don’t need to go to trial. 

If you do however decide to go to trial and move to formal Discovery, the work product from your ECA has already helped you refine your data set, with key custodians, key words and documents initially defined. Your data will be easier to work throughout the case since you will have already limited the number of documents that need to be reviewed. You can now also make more informed decisions from the meet-and-confer through the life of the case, keeping your scope defined and costs contained.

Early Case Assessment with RelativityOne

RelativityOne provides a simple Early Case Assessment option, allowing you to access your data in the same workspace interface you’re familiar with but at significantly reduced cost and a few limitations.

Initial stages of an Early Case Assessment in RelativityOne may include:

  • Gathering Information

  • Analyzing key words and evaluating your data

  • Searching data that may be potentially relevant

  • Refining data to be promoted for review

  • Presenting your findings to outside counsel

  • Building your eDiscovery budget and timeline

RelativityOne’s ECA workflow integrates seamlessly through your eDiscovery, allowing you to scale up and down as needed with RelativityOne’s suite of tools with collection, processing, review, and production capabilities. This allows you to facilitate the whole process all in one platform, keeping your data and work product centralized throughout the life of the case.

Is Early Case Assessment Right for You?

When considering an ECA workflow, it’s important to determine what your goals, timelines and budget are and what questions are you looking to answer. Some considerations may be: What deadlines has the court put upon us? Is this something we can manage in house or need to pull in an outside vendor? What is the liability? What are the costs going to be? How much of this data is relevant to the merits of the litigation?

One of the major benefits that you may find from using an ECA tool is that you are able to calculate risk prior to putting documents through a review platform. Nowadays, there is more online data than ever, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to cull down documents on your own without a tool to help you. The advantage of using an ECA tool is that you can eliminate non-relevant data and focus on the facts to determine the potential route and outcome of your case. ECA can be a more cost-effective way to start your discovery at significantly reduced cost, using a reduced amount of data to gain insights into the direction of your case.

Considering using an ECA workflow in your next case? Contact one of our expert Project Advisors for a free consultation!

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About Acorn

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

Why Is eDiscovery So Expensive?

There is still a common misconception that eDiscovery is expensive. Even though eDiscovery can save you money long term, people are still hesitant to invest in these services. You or the IT department may try to complete discovery requests on their own, and this can be a viable solution but not always. However, eDiscovery professionals are equipped with a significant level of training and expertise that is unique to them and tailored specifically to handle discovery requests. Without this expertise, discovery can quickly become overwhelming or grow out of control. This is why it’s best not to think about eDiscovery in terms of line-item costs, but to consider the big picture, in which the total cost encompasses the expertise, time consumption, and security that is needed to move through the discovery phase most efficiently.

What Training is Required for eDiscovery Professionals?

Just as in any line of work, training is necessary to become an expert at something. For example, most of us could probably handle our own taxes and financials. But how about the taxes for our firm or company as a whole? Would we trust this task to anyone with a basic understanding, no probably not. We would expect at the very least the person was a CPA. The same principles should apply to eDiscovery. You or I could probably search and pull some emails from our accounts but would be the appropriate individual to handle searching various communication sources across 10s of custodians, probably not. These matters required specific understandings of the laws, requirements, and processes, which is why we should rely on the professionals that have dedicated their abilities to become experts.

eDiscovery professionals display most of their expertise through certifications offered by various organizations. Two of the most recognizable certifications are offered by ACEDS and Relativity. ACEDS’ Certified eDiscovery Specialist (CEDS), a trusted global indicator of e-discovery competence, demonstrates an individual’s expertise across the entire e-discovery lifecycle, including e-discovery project planning, international discovery, and ethics in e-discovery. Similar Relativity offers various certifications such as Relativity Certified Administrator (RCA) and multiple Relativity Specialist certifications. After completion of a certain number of certifications, an individuals earns the title of a Relativity Certified Expert and then the scarce honor of Relativity Certified Master.

Your Time is Valuable

Oftentimes, junior associates oversee the discovery phase and could truly benefit from the technology an eDiscovery vendor provides. eDiscovery involves collecting and reviewing a significant amount of data, and it could take hours upon hours to complete this process manually, taking time away from other crucial work that needs to be done.

When it comes to trial, a lawyer often needs to produce a document for court quickly. With eDiscovery software, this is easy to accomplish, but if someone were to look for the document manually, it could take hours of time that many lawyers simply don’t have. Even smaller cases need significant evidence and require large amounts of data. Therefore, the cost of using an eDiscovery service to easily find documents makes the price worth it.

Privacy Risks

When working through the discovery phase, you are often working with sensitive personal data. Unfortunately, in today’s world, it’s becoming more common for computer systems and data to become compromised. Often times we don’t consider the many vulnerabilities we create for our data as we transfer it from one party to the next.

When using an eDiscovery vendor, you don’t have to worry about these security risks. At Acorn, we use RelativityOne built on Microsoft Azure – the most secure cloud on the market. Because of this, RelativityOne meets the industry highest security standards such as ISO 27001; SOC 2, Type II; HIPAA; and FedRAMP. So not only is your data centralized in the cloud, but is also protected to the highest degree.

Is eDiscovery Worth the Cost?

If you’re considering working with an eDiscovery vendor, you may not be viewing the cost in terms of the opportunity. Completing the discovery phase on your own can take countless hours that your team might not have. To successfully complete eDiscovery on your own, there is a level of expertise that is needed. If you want to avoid wasted time, miscommunication, and privacy risks, it may be the best decision to opt for an eDiscovery vendor.

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

Back to the Basics: Why Is It Important to Have a Centralized eDiscovery Platform?

The discovery phase of litigation usually is not something we all look forward to. And even when prepared, it can quickly become the most costly, time-consuming, and stressful part of litigation. With tens of thousands of documents to sort through, it’s hard to imagine how anyone can handle this task alone. While it is possible to handle eDiscovery in-house, not everyone has the resources to do so. Organizations can be caught off guard and overwhelmed fast, leading to unexpected time consumption and costs. This is where an eDiscovery partner can step in. Establishing a relationship with an eDiscovery partner early on allows you to have the resources available when you need to scale up quickly, with a team familiar with your organization and workflows. With a little bit of preparation, a partner can seamlessly step in and give you back the bandwidth to focus on more important things and keep your budget predictable and controlled.  

Think of eDiscovery as an Investment, Not a Cost

Budget concerns are a major concern for every business, coupled with the uncertainty of this past year. You may be wondering how the cost of using an eDiscovery company can actually save you money. Often, people fixate on the line item or upfront price tags. The process should not be looked at as a cost but an investment to manage your overall, long term budget.  

The first thing to think about is the amount of work your team would be doing if they were to complete the discovery process in-house. The easiest way to think about this is in terms of the total cost of review, notably one of the most expensive parts of eDiscovery. With the use of different technologies constantly expanding in the workplace, the amounts of data needed in litigation are only going to keep increasing. With investments upfront in an eDiscovery partner and/or technology, you can utilize efficient workflows, narrowing and refining your data at the onset. Yes, initial costs go up, but litigation typically isn’t a quick process. When looking at the proceeding months, we minimized our recurring data that needs to be hosted and ultimately our final set of documents needing reviewed. Something as small as 2,000 documents, will save us a week of work. Which leads us to our next consideration, Time.

Time Is an Asset

Time is another factor that usually gets overlooked when making these investment considerations. For example, if we say it only takes my team 20 hours review these documents, why would I pay someone else to help with this process? But we need to consider how much your team’s 20 hours is worth. Factoring in their salaried hourly rate, as well 20 hours not performing revenue/value generating activities, suddenly the costs become much more comparable.

But let’s say your team has the bandwidth to spare. We all know how difficult it can be to search for one email among the thousands in our inbox. Now, think of how difficult it becomes to search through hundreds of thousands of emails that might pertain to the information you need to prepare for trial. Using an eDiscovery platform, the same team member could spend just 15 minutes in an eDiscovery platform and be able to find the identify the relevant data and bypass all the “junk”. This is especially useful when you have many cases to work on at once, and every minute is valuable. Your team has more valuable activities they can focus on instead of treading through emails. So, we discussed all these great hypotheticals and efficiencies, but how do we make them a reality?

Find a Solution That’s Right for You

Before we dive into this section. Let us first state, there are many solutions out there and even if ours isn’t right for you, we strongly encourage you to still find one that is a good fit. The solution we leverage, RelativityOne, allows you to seamlessly collect, process, and review your documents. Whether that’s an email account, text messages on a phone, O365 documents, or Microsoft Teams conversations, RelativityOne allows us to easily obtain and review any data no matter where it resides.

It also allows us to detect information that you would not have been able to find otherwise, with advance searching capabilities and tools such as conceptual and contextual analytics. Removing the redundant process of combing through documents from your workload will streamline the eDiscovery process, allowing you to spend your time on the documents that actually matter.

Not only does it save you time, but additionally keeps all your relevant documents centralized, organized, and secure. Organization is important in any field, but is extremely critical when you’re working with large amounts of sensitive data. When piecing through the documents needed for trial, you want to make sure you have them all in one central, organized place which is readily available at your fingertip. By conveniently being able to centralize your documents and organize them with saved searches and tags, you can do just that.

Is It Worth It?

Discovery is one of the most challenging parts of litigation, and it can either be seamless, or require countless hours of work and stress. An eDiscovery platform like RelativityOne can turn discovery into a quick and easy step in the litigation process by minimizing your data burden, increasing your speed of identifying and reviewing documents, and keeping your data organized and accessible.

If you haven’t had these conversations yet, or haven’t in a while, now is a good time to understand how a partnership could improve your operations. The Acorn team is always happy to discuss and educate our community to ensure they are handling the discovery phase as efficiently as possible. Whether a case is 10GB or 1,000GB, the discovery process doesn’t have to be something we dread anymore.

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com. 

InfoGov World 2021 | The Next Generation of Piece Mail: Where does Microsoft Teams fit into Information Governance?

Acorn’s CEO, Lia Majid, and Business Development Manager, Zef Deda joined the 2021 InfoGov World Expo & Conference alongside 100+ expert speakers across major facets of IG, from Data Governance, Privacy & Data Protection, eDiscovery, etc. The Acorn team joined this conversation through their session, ‘The Next Generation of Piece Mail: Where Does Microsoft Teams fit into Information Governance?’, which explored the new information governance challenges related to the increasing use of Microsoft Teams throughout organizations and firms.

It’s no secret that over the past year, Microsoft Teams has rapidly increased in popularity due to many organizations switching to remote work during the pandemic. With this increase in Teams communications, organizations are faced with new challenges related to modern attachments, information governance considerations, handling ESI protocols, collections, and review and production.

A key point Acorn’s Chief Executive Officer emphasized during the session was that Teams data is disparate. She explained that Teams files are stored in one area of SharePoint for one-on-one conversations and another area of SharePoint for group conversations. Oftentimes, when completing collections and reviews, attachments shared in Teams will not easily carry over during eDiscovery. This can cause issues as trying to review documents that are stuck in the backend can be very difficult, especially if we aren’t aware they exist.

Lia explained that in order to collect one-on-one Teams messages, you need to have a certain level of subscription to allow you to access the data. If you’re not managing your Teams data proactively, then you’ll have discoverable information that can be costly to access through Microsoft. Not to mention, it’s not possible to extract one-on-one Teams data without having access to Microsoft’s Protected API, and you can’t currently collect team by team.

This is something to consider in terms of Information Governance, because if you need to remove data, you need to have policies oriented to these new types of communications in place to enforce this. For instance, if any employee were to leave your organization, you need to determine whether to leave their account as active for a period of time and for how long, so you can still access their Teams data.  

Due to these challenges, Lia and Zef suggested one of the ways to address these challenges is leveraging new technologies, such as Relativity Collect. Collect has an easy wizard that lets you access all these disparate sources in one centralized environment, following these steps

  1. Set up the collection job
  2. Choose the custodians
  3. Choose the types of data you want to collect
  4. Choose the workspace
  5. Publish the collected data to a processing workspace

Along with being cloud based, keeping your data more secure, its direct integration with Microsoft Teams makes this an ideal way to collect data. Once collected, the Relativity’s RSMF will allow you to review the Teams conversation the same way in RelativityOne as they would appear in the Teams platform.

As with any new challenge, we are continually identifying and addressing the best practices and procedures in which to stay one step ahead. As Teams has now become foundational in organizations and firms, now is the time to face these challenges and start the discussions on how you and your team can handle them and what steps you need to take to do so.

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

ILTACON 2021 | Discovery, Information Governance and Retention: How Long Should This Go On?

Acorn’s Director of Legal Discovery Consulting, Amanda Cook, joined ILTACON 2021’s  “Discovery, Information Governance and Retention: How Long Should This Go On?” panel alongside Stephen Dempsey, eDiscovery Program Lead at The Chemours Company and Ricky Brooman, Director of Litigation Support Services at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr, LLP.

The panel expands on how information governance and a corporation’s established data retention and deletion process should apply to e-discovery, but that is sometimes easier said than done.

A key point Acorn’s Director of Legal Discovery Consulting emphasized was, “E-discovery can’t be an island…We can’t think of it on its own. We need to think about it proactively”. Further noting, state and international privacy laws, and the increasing prevalence of data breaches, requires an established, proactive plan for e-discovery data.

To start, we need to shift from a reactive to proactive approach. Amanda is often a recipient of the reactive decisions of what to do with the data. The problems arise when you are at the end of the case – maybe it was settled, maybe it was dismissed, or only a portion of the data is needed – but we have to do something with all of this data.

This is something that needs to be thought about at the onset and throughout a matter, Amanda explains, because eDiscovery creates a lot of data around the data. It’s not just the data itself, but it’s copies, emails about the data and work product, and communications surrounding it. All of this has to be a part of the analysis we are making when we are talking about what we are retaining and what is within the terms of our retention policy. Ricky Brooman notes “When you have a framework you understand what data you created across the EDRM, and can make informed decisions when you are ready to close it down”

Amanda further explains that you have to consider all the places this data might exist, where it’s being created, how it’s being created and how do we gather and track it through the full EDRM lifecycle so that we can dispose or retain of it at the end.

If there is one thing to add to your process, Amanda mentioned, it is documentation. Documentation is key and will prevent you from having to go back through emails 75 times to figure out what happened throughout your process. You want to easily be able to state that through whole process, we kept x,y, and z and here are the 5 reasons why. Through this you create a defensible process and procedure behind it.

View the whole session here.

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

How to Manage Your Total Cost of Review: Putting it All Together

As we discussed in my previous articles, we identified where opportunities existed throughout our eDiscovery process where we can directly impact our bottom line and contain our total cost of review.

To recap, we first identified how targeting and narrowing our scope of collections reduced our review costs by up to approximately 30%. Secondly, we identified how an early investment in an ECA to reduce our cull rate by a few percent led to cost reductions of up to approximately 15%. Lastly, we identified how investing in advanced analytics, such as active learning, led to significant cost reductions of up to approximately 30%.

Individually, we can see that each one of our choices prior to review choices led to notable savings over the life of the case. In today’s exercise, we will look at back at all the oppurtunies we previously identified and the choices we made. This leads us to our final question: What happens when we put it all together?

Establishing the Numbers

Let’s recap the assumptions we will continue to work off of. In this scenario, we have 6 devices with costs of $500 per device and each device has 50 gigabytes of data. Assume each gigabyte contains 1,000 documents, and our reviewers work at a rate of 50 documents per hour at $50 an hour.

Lastly, our processing rate will be $35 per gigabyte, and hosting will be $25 per gigabyte, per month. We will also be using a four-month lifecycle for this case.

Putting it all Together

So what happens when you put it all together? If we narrow our initial collection, investing in culling the data better and leverage active learning, What’s the net impact of that in economic terms?

First of all, we have to acknowledge that there will be diminishing returns. When looking at each choice individually, it will have a greater impact since it is the only thing affecting our data set. But when done simultaneously, the individual impact will be reduced since we are leveraging each choice on top of the previous one. Think of it as taking a percent of a percent.

The “Perfect” Workflow

So let’s start in Month 1 start. We will perform our targeted collection, collecting 4 devices instead of 6. This will result in our initial cost savings of $1,000 and some reduction to our hosting and processing costs to come.

In Month 2, we will invest $5,000 upfront for an ECA and take a closer look at our data set. As we previously discussed we expected to increase our cull rate by 5% to 85%. Our hosting and processing will still be slightly reduced compared to the “Standard Workflow”, but our Month 2 total costs are now slightly higher with our “Perfect” Workflow. Don’t be deterred just yet, remember, our real goal is to reduce our total costs.

Let’s look at Month 3. We now make our $3,000 investment into analytics expertise upfront to use active learning technology. Similar to Month 2, our recurring costs stay the same and are lower than the “Standard Workflow”. But as we can see in the chart below, our incurred costs are continuing to increase and it would appear as if the “Perfect” Workflow is driving more expenses than savings. This doesn’t seem like a very convincing exercise does it?

The End is in Sight

Now it’s time to reap the fruits of our labor. Month 4 is the finish line we have been working towards. So through each month, we initially reduced out costs by $1,000 with our targeted collection, incurred $5,000 of costs with an ECA, and then an additional $3,000 of costs utilizing active learning. Net additional costs of $7,000. This might seem high now but is small in comparison to our total costs.

So, let’s move into our review phase and look at how our initial investments played out. So in this example, we would have reduced our total cost by approximately $34,000. You may also notice that there a range present on the chart. Realistically, it’s hard to gauge exactly what each investment affect on our review costs will be, but even at the expected high-end of the range, we still see cost savings of approximately $20,000.   

The Key Take Away

And so, my message to everyone is that strategic workflows can provide a significant amount of budget efficiency beyond just line-item reviews, reductions. So certainly, if you want to reduce total cost of review, and you can get down to 90 cents per document reviewed instead of $1 per document reviewed. That’s going to reduce your total cost of review, certainly, but we can only squeeze that lemon so much, and there’s not a lot of juice left in it. For the most part the industry has gotten about as low as it can get on almost all of the line items to continue reducing TCR. So, by identifying strategic opportunities throughout the life of our project we can continue to seize all possible cost savings.

And so as we think about discovery in 2021. The key takeaways is, now is the time to evaluate your opportunities  to reduce the total cost of review, which ones you currently utilize and which ones you have the potential to implement. We identified 3 effective ways to do so, and they all don’t need to be utilized, but just by adopting one of these approaches you are going to see significant results pretty quickly.  

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

How to Manage Your Total Cost of Review: Actively Understand Your Document Set

Continuing on the subject of reining in your total cost of review (TCR), it must be reiterated that budget concerns were more prominent than ever among legal teams in 2020—and continue to be halfway into this year.

When it comes to e-discovery, review is always the greatest cost driver, so any opportunity we have to reduce its scope—and, in turn, its costs—should be seized. But teams must first take stock of where these opportunities exist throughout the e-discovery process in order to have the most significant impact on that bottom line.

So, returning to this always timely subject, let’s revisit that all-important working question of: How do our choices prior to review affect our total cost?

Thus far, we’ve analyzed the usefulness of targeted collections and ECA in reducing TCR. Today, let’s home in on artificial intelligence.

Establishing the Numbers

Let’s recap the assumptions we will continue to work off of. In this scenario, we have 6 devices with costs of $500 per device and each device has 50 gigabytes of data. Assume each gigabyte contains 1,000 documents, and our reviewers work at a rate of 50 documents per hour at $50 an hour.

Lastly, our processing rate will be $35 per gigabyte, and hosting will be $25 per gigabyte, per month. We will also be using a four-month lifecycle for this case.

 

 

In my previous article, How to Manage Your total Cost of Review: Every Percent Matters, we took this same scenario and presented the choice of paying upfront costs to utilize an ECA to reduce our cull rate by 5 percent. We found that, through this, we were able to produce significant cost savings: upwards of $11,000.

In today’s exercise, let’s move on from the ECA stage. The last question we’ll visit here is: With your current data set, would you invest $3,000 on analytics expertise upfront to use active learning technology? This would mean leveraging artificial intelligence to create a responsive and non-responsive model that will assist your review.

$3,000 for Active Learning?

With this option, there are no additional hosting fees and no other technology fees—you basically have to pay for an expert to help you think through how you’re going to set up your workflow and then execute on it with the software you’re already using.

This is very much like the previous situation. The first and second month fees are essentially the same, because we’re talking about a workflow option that’s happening a little later in the process. In this scenario, you have this expertise you’re spending money on in Month 3, versus the standard workflow where you’re not adding that expense. So, you won’t see any cost savings until Month 3 or later.

If your standard workflow ends up costing you about $77,000, what does the active learning workflow cost you?

It’s Not Black and White

This becomes a tough question to answer actually, because active learning is used a few different ways.

One way is that we take all the documents that you are going to look at, split them into the documents we care about—the ones with the proverbial “thumbs up” for relevance—and the ones we don’t care about, which are the “thumbs down.” A reviewer will still need to look at every document. This may be the safest way to utilize active learning, but It’s also the least economically efficient. The benefit of this approach is that you’ll still find the documents that you care about faster, because we are using the model to push the most relevant documents to the front of the line.

The second way we can use active learning is less manual still. We can take your pile of documents, knowing there is the stuff we care about and stuff we don’t, and we can put enough eyes on the document set to evaluate what’s relevant. With this approach, we opt not to train the model fully, by manually coding all documents. Instead, we are reasonably confident the model is producing accurate predictions. We never need to look at portions of the document set, avoiding things such as mass emails, fantasy football emails, or other junk, since the model is helping to sort it out for us.

And lastly, we can look at just enough documents to train the active learning model, and go with its predictions from there. But this approach requires full trust in the model and minimizes quality control checks, so it certainly isn’t right for every case.

And so, depending on which one of these workflows you use, your results in terms of the impact on TCR will vary. At Acorn, we almost always recommend the second approach, as more than often it tends to be most applicable and beneficial to clients.

What Do the Numbers Say?

With all of this in mind, in the chart below we illustrate how these approaches play out. As we can see, you can end up with an active learning project that results in equal or significantly less costs overall compared to the standard model.

If we conceptualized our active learning from the beginning, we more likely would see a reduction of about $20,000, or 30-35 percent. This is largely thanks to active learning’s ability to quickly and automatically differentiate the relevant documents from the noise. You will still need eyeballs on the relevant documents, but active learning can be an incredibly useful tool to avoid having to put eyeballs on every document—especially those that are not relevant to your matter.

What’s the Right Answer?

So again, generally, active learning is a good investment, even without reducing the document set before applying it. And that’s because it’s pretty inexpensive to implement. Even in cases where you don’t save money, you gain time—which is, of course, its own form of value.

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About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.

How to Manage Your Total Cost of Review: Every Percent Matters

Continuing on the subject of reining in your total cost of review (TCR), it must be reiterated that budget concerns were more prominent than ever among legal teams in 2020—and continue to be halfway into this year.

When it comes to e-discovery, review is always the greatest cost driver, so any opportunity we have to reduce its scope—and, in turn, its costs—should be seized. But teams must first take stock of where these opportunities exist throughout the e-discovery process in order to have the most significant impact on that bottom line.

On that note, let’s revisit that all-important working question of: How do our choices prior to review affect our total cost?

Last time we focused on the usefulness of targeted collections in reducing TCR. Today, let’s home in on early case assessment.

Establishing the Numbers

Let’s recap the assumptions we will continue to work off of. In this scenario, we have 6 devices with costs of $500 per device and each device has 50 gigabytes of data. Assume each gigabyte contains 1,000 documents, and our reviewers work at a rate of 50 documents per hour at $50 an hour.

Lastly, our processing rate will be $35 per gigabyte, and hosting will be $25 per gigabyte, per month. We will also be using a four-month lifecycle for this case.

In my previous article, How to Manage Your Total Cost of Review: Keeping Collections on Target, we took this same scenario and presented the choice of collecting broadly or collecting narrowly. We found that, through targeting our collection, we were able to not only reduce monthly recurring fees, but significantly reduce our total costs of review by up to $25,000.

In today’s exercise, let’s move on from the collection stage. The second question we’ll visit here is: For the custodians you collected, would you spend $5,000 up front to increase the cull rate from 80 percent to 85 percent?

Is 5% Worth $5,000?

$5,000 may seem like a lot when the total cost throughout the matter is about $50,000. Thinking in this vein, you may ask yourself: Since we already have such a high cull rate at 80 percent (remember—this means that only 1 in 5 collected documents make their way to review), why would I spend 10 percent of my overall budget for what seems like a minuscule increase of an extra 5 percent?

Well, let’s look at what the numbers say. You’re collecting and processing the same amount of data, so those costs will remain unchanged. However, in Month 3, we will start to notice that the costs shift between a scenario in which we make this extra investment in early case assessment (ECA) to increase our cull rate to 85 percent, and one where we don’t.

In the graph below you’ll notice the hosting sizes might appear similar but I assure you, they’re actually different, and we’ve reduced our monthly hosting costs by $400. But let’s be honest: it’s nothing notable and we had to spend $5,000 for those results. If we stopped right here, it would take us about a year to break even. At this point, you’re probably feeling pretty good if you chose to not to go with conducting ECA.

Looking at the Big Picture

But e-discovery doesn’t stop there. When we start thinking about this not in terms of hosting sizes but in the number of documents that will be reviewed, the real costs savings start to show.

Examined through this lens, you’ll find that, even though you’ve spent that additional $5,000 in Month 3, we’ve actually saved $11,000 over the life of the matter.

These savings are coming from two sources.

First, as we mentioned, your hosting costs have been reduced; not significantly, but it does compound over the life of the case.

Second, you should note that your biggest expense by far is the number of documents being reviewed. And so, if $5,000 removes at least 5,000 documents from review, then that $5,000 has paid for itself. If that $5,000 saves you more than 5,000 documents from being reviewed, then we were able to come out ahead and reduce our total costs.

How You Can Apply This

Utilizing ECA can be an ambiguous concept, as it can involve many different strategies for culling irrelevant data from a collection. A variety of tools can assist with the process as well, all of which can be found in RelativityOne.

One example of a basic approach to ECA that you could use to improve your culling rate is to take one or two key custodians, and pull them into an ECA workflow that allows you to gain insights into their data before it’s all fully processed into your review workspace. In this staging area, you can leverage artificial intelligence to produce communication visualizations and run a search terms report. Using some of this information and what you already know about the case, you can put together a brief timeline utilizing Case Dynamics to help you lay out the matter and see where your collected data might fall into that timeline. The combination of these applications will help you limit the date range and other data characterizations of your matter with confidence.

Now, this is just one example of a workflow and the tools you could utilize in an early case assessment exercise. To really extract the full value of the applications you may have on hand, and build case strategies for this and every matter that will help you produce the best possible outcomes, consider finding a partner with the expertise to apply the tools on a granular level. Their expertise may be essential to discovering and applying your new secret sauce.

It’s Always Worth Taking a Look

At Acorn, this scenario is one that we encounter quite often—but frequently with an even smaller percentage increase in the cull rate (think something like 80 percent to 80.5 percent). Even at a difference that small, depending on how much data you’re working with in your matter, that 0.5 percent can pay for itself very quickly.

Still, I do have to acknowledge that these scenarios are not one-size-fits-all. There are scenarios in which these additional upfront costs are not justifiable, such as if you expect to settle before review or if you’re working with a very small set of data. There’s little incentive to invest when you don’t expect to realize the returns of this investment.

In most scenarios, however, this investment will produce significant total cost savings throughout the life of a case—and in all scenarios, it is beneficial to at least evaluate this investment at the onset of the matter.

Stay tuned for next month as I continue this exercise and examine how we can leverage advanced technologies to further streamline our review and further reduce our total costs.

Be Sure to Follow Me for the Latest Content and Subscribe For the Latest Acorn Insights! 

About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com. 

How to Manage Your Total Cost of Review: Keeping Your Collection on Target

As each year progresses, one thing is continually top of mind for businesses of all kinds: the budget.



In e-discovery, no one wants to miss their budget targets, whether they’re set by their team or their client—but it is a possibility we all face from case to case. Fortunately, it is usually preventable and at the very least mitigable.



With budget concerns having been particularly prominent through 2020, and that trend continuing into this year, it’s crucial to look at why and where we are generating the most costs and how we can manage them.

Review, of course, has long been a huge expense in the e-discovery processes. However, it is now facing added pressures from new challenges with evolving data types and volumes, and considerations for managing remote review teams as well. Even with these new challenges, creating efficiency for your review can still be easily achievable and directly translates to reduced total costs.



Since budgets are so important to the industry, our team at Acorn has spent a lot of time trying to think about how to best optimize its e-discovery workflows to consistently stay within parameters. To dig into this question, we’ve come up with a standard workflow for a case that is routine—pretty much what you would see across the industry—and put it to the test to understand what workflow changes can have the greatest impact on bottom lines.



With that in mind, we can have a real-world discussion around how review decisions get made and how the total cost of review (TCR) can be better managed and understood.



The working question guiding this exercise is: How do our choices prior to review affect our total cost?



To answer this question, let’s walk through an example. For our standard workflow, we’ve simply come back to the good old EDRM: collection, processing, hosting, and then review. I assigned prices to each stage that are generally close to market averages, but also nice round numbers for the sake of our math. I intend this to be an illustrative exercise, and not get into the legal arguments for increasing or reducing the scope of discovery—so keep in mind that this is entirely intended to be focused on the economics.


Establishing the Numbers

So, let’s lay out the scenario. As a baseline, let’s say we have a collection of 6 devices with costs of $500 per device and each device has 50 gigabytes of data. Assume each gigabyte contains 1,000 documents, and our reviewers work at a rate of 50 documents per hour at $50 an hour. Lastly, our processing rate will be $35 per gigabyte, and hosting will be $25 per gigabyte per month. We will also be using 4-month longevity for this case. We will be aggregating these costs throughout the months in the chart to follow.





Now that the baseline is established, let’s see how a review scenario can play out. In this article, we will focus on the collection stage. So, first question: We have the option of doing a collection broadly or doing it targeted. Which do you choose?


Collect Narrowly or Collect Broadly?

With a broad collection, we end up collecting the whole of all our data—meaning every custodian and every gigabyte that possibly could be relevant to our matter. On the surface, this has some sensibility; after all, we want to be thorough and meet our legal obligations, and we’re facing a relatively small cost of $500 per device for collection. As a result of this decision, we would collect data from all 6 devices in this case.



The alternative is a targeted collection. In this course of action, we will be more precise with our collection, avoiding custodians that are not crucial to the matter at this time. (We determine that we can go back later and collect from them if they turn out to be more critical than initially thought.) With this approach, we decide that only 4 of the 6 are crucial to our matter, so we would collect data from 4 of these devices.


Looking at the Big Picture

As you can see in the figure below, the initial costs are only marginally lower with the targeted collection—nothing too extreme. But the real impact of this collection is seen in Month 4. That’s where the numbers start to expand.



On the surface, when looking at the collection stage itself, we are faced with a difference in expenses of only $1,000. Why take the time to target your collection and risk having to recollect for a custodian later for such a small sum?



Well, as it turns out, that $1,000 savings initial isn’t the end goal—and how we collect will exponentially affect our TCR downstream. Let’s look at this through the full course of discovery.





As we see with this figure, initially our upfront costs are lower, followed by lower processing and hosting fees. But let’s look further down the line. With our targeted collection, we not only reduced our fees for Months 1 through 3, but significantly reduced our total review costs during Month 4. This led to a cost savings of approximately $25,000.


How You Can Address Collections

A targeted collection isn’t always time feasible or as convenient in the moment, but there are solutions out there that can assist with this process. One of those would be RelativityOne Collect.



RelativityOne Collect allows you to collect data straight from the source, without that data ever leaving the cloud. It currently integrates with Office 365—so, most of our emails—as well as Slack, Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Bloomberg Chat, and WebEx, with additional endpoints to come. The nice thing about Collect is that you can filter your data sources at the onset, such as by custodian, date, and so on, allowing you to easily collect exactly what you need and nothing more.



Not only does Collect, and parallel tools, provide the ability to make your collections proactive, but it’s also defensibly sound with detailed reporting and a complete audit trail. This benefit that can prevent mishaps, such as those that occurred last year in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. M1 5100 Corp. when the defendant performed a self-collection.


Managing TCR is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

I do acknowledge this isn’t a perfect example and that we could quite possibly have to collect from another custodian as the case progresses, which would ultimately add to our costs—but in the end, even just collecting from 5 versus 6 devices is still impactful and would still reduce total review costs by at least $10,000.



Of course, this is only one consideration we should keep in mind from the onset of any matter. With this perspective, you can not only perform precise collections, but collections that are defensibly sound and create real budgetary impacts. But collections are only one step in the process, so don’t limit your focus.

____________

Be Sure to Follow Me for the Latest Content and Subscribe For the Latest Acorn Insights! 

About Acorn 

Acorn is a legal data consulting firm that specializes in AI and Advanced Analytics for litigation applications, while providing rigorous customer service to the eDiscovery industry. Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides a high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications. For more information, please visit www.acornls.com.