Uncategorized Archives - Acorn Legal Solutions

AI Arsenal: How Boutique Firms Like MoloLamken Are Playing at the Larger Level with Artificial Intelligence

Recently named a 2023 Relativity AI Visionary, Acorn Legal Solutions’ CEO Lia Majid sat down with Jen Doran, Discovery Counsel at MoloLamken LLP to discuss how the use of AI/TAR has benefitted mid-sized law firms and, as Jen explained, has become more “fascinating than television.”

Before attending Emory University School of Law, Jen worked at a law firm doing things the old-fashioned way, using red flags to mark hot documents and issues. After working in big law for eight years, Jen utilized her love of the “sleuthing” part of a case to take on a discovery-centric role at litigation boutique MoloLamken. She currently represents clients in government investigations, class actions, arbitration proceedings, and other complex federal and state court litigation.

Leveraging technology to understand data from initial case assessment to gathering evidence for trial, Jen advises on best practices and collaborates with case teams to deploy strategies that will achieve clients’ desired goals and outcomes. Her expertise in eDiscovery, information governance, and data protection has enabled Jen to assist clients including commercial banks, a Fortune 100 insurance conglomerate, a global personal care product company, and Fortune 100 executives with complex matters.

Need for Dedicated Discovery Resources

Lia Majid: “So you specialized in eDiscovery at a large firm, and then you came over to a lit boutique at MoloLamken. How did you make that transition? What prompted you to take an eDiscovery role with MoloLamken?”

Jen Doran: “I really was drawn to the fact that MoloLamken dedicated specific resources to developing their discovery practice. They carved out roles in multiple offices for discovery counsel, and what you may have heard about our lit boutique is that we’re known to “punch above our weight.” We come in sometimes mid-stream to very complex, sophisticated matters and we have to get our arms around a large amount of data very fast. So, I really liked coming to a place that knew that if you’re going to play ball at that level, you need to have folks who dedicate their time to understanding how to do that effectively.”

Lia Majid: “Do you think that it’s common for firms of MoloLamken’s size or footprint to have dedicated discovery resources?”

Jen Doran: “More often than not, I have seen the opposite, where associates are tasked with a large portion of the discovery work. That results in some unhappiness for multiple people – the team, the attorney, and the client. The attorney is not developing the skills they truly want to master most to develop their practice, and clients are paying exorbitant rates for review that may not have needed to be performed in that fashion.”

Artificial Intelligence: The Whole Arsenal or the Silver Bullet?

Discovery isn’t always easy – and due to its changing nature, it can feel nearly impossible to navigate AI/TAR without a dedicated discovery counsel or a trusted vendor for support. While AI tools may be challenging to navigate, they have been a cornerstone for MoloLamken’s success in providing time and cost savings to clients.

Lia Majid: “Do you use a lot of AI tools when you’re working on your discovery projects?”

Jen Doran: “Active learning and artificial intelligence can be great tools for prioritization; understanding and making sure that you get to the hottest materials first. If you tee up a mediation, you might even be able to resolve the case before millions of dollars of client money are spent on taking it further and that’s only because you had the key facts in hand right away. What I think is really cool is we are moving into a phase where we have sentiment analysis now and the machine will know to provide you with documents that might tell you how this person had developed a motive and give a feeling for some of the allegations that you’re trying to understand or build.” 

Despite the obvious positive changes that Jen has found through using AI for discovery, it is still something that other team members or clients may not understand or find as valuable.

Lia Majid: “How is it easiest for you to sell AI to your other attorneys at your law firm and explain it to your clients so they feel more comfortable adopting it?”

Jen Doran: “What I like to tell them is that this will really help us improve the accuracy of our product. If we know that a certain document with a high responsiveness score might’ve been coded as non-responsive, we know to look at those in particular. We can spend more of our time on difficult privilege calls or further review discussions because we aren’t engaging in constant rework of documents. Artificial intelligence has made us able to reduce the time that we spend laying a second pair of eyes, a third pair of eyes, a fourth pair of eyes on a document, and allows us to really focus on making sure we understand what the most important information is.”

Lia Majid: “It sounds like what you’re saying is that AI is a tool in your arsenal, but not the silver bullet, so you need an eDiscovery expert to put all the pieces together and apply it to the specific situation of the case.”

Jen Doran: “Anyone who is familiar with the tools is required to know what its limitations are. We all know about the model rules of professional conduct that tell us our duty of competence – that we are required to – if not understand the technology – then at least bring on an expert or collaborate with someone who does understand the technology. You cannot ignore the technology available because then you are doing a disservice to your client. It is here to stay, and it is not something where we can stick our head in the sand and ignore it to do things the old-fashioned way, because it will not work, and you may get in trouble.”

Staying Ahead of the Curve – Changes in AI in Recent Years 

Lia Majid: “How have you seen AI change your practice of eDiscovery in the years that you’ve been practicing [in eDiscovery] so far?”

Jen Doran: “We are moving into an era where we have more mobile communications and chat communications. Users don’t even seem to talk on email as much as they used to because they have other applications that are faster, more immediate, and more casual. And so, using these tools, we can sometimes understand more of the sentiments behind what people are actually trying to convey. We can perform better quality control because the volume of documents has increased so exponentially. We’re able to look at what a responsiveness rank might be and determine whether documents need to be corrected.”

Lia Majid: “So you’re using AI for quality control now, in addition to prioritizing which document should be reviewed? Do you think that trend is going to continue? Or do you see AI broadening how it affects the discovery practice?”

Jen Doran: “I think that now folks are more concerned with whether generative AI is going to take on the role of understanding what information is being fed into it and providing responses like: ‘Tell me what’s in these documents. I gave you 1,000 emails, tell me what’s in there.’ People are wondering if lawyers are even going to be needed anymore because now, we have machines. What’s going to be really important is, instead of having just a few individuals in the industry who are really invested and engaged in this subject matter, it’s going to become a more uniform and requisite part of day-to-day life. Just like in the early days, electronic Bates Stamping was novel and now it’s routine. Active learning, and all the different methods that we have now to incorporate artificial intelligence are also going to become somewhat rote.”

Lia Majid: “Given the breadth of expertise required for eDiscovery, do you think it makes sense for all firms to have an eDiscovery expert on staff?”

Jen Doran: “In a perfect world I would say that, yes, every entity in the WORLD should have an eDiscovery counsel! However, that’s not necessarily always appropriate. The legal field is unique in having such a high-quality availability of vendors who really know their stuff inside out, acting as outside consultants who can come in on a matter-by-matter basis and assist firms, depending on their size and their needs, with what they have to accomplish. So, in that respect, it’s very feasible and reasonable that some firms might be able to turn to a vendor for that purpose.”

As data volumes only continue to spiral upward, Jen’s predictions may be correct, as there is only more and more data that will need to be collected, with an already disproportionate lack of personnel who are interested and capable of completing this type of work. Similarly, not all organizations have the option to use high-powered eDiscovery technology due to budgetary concerns, which is why Jen is also a proud supporter of Relativity’s Justice for Change program.

Access to eDiscovery For All – MoloLamken’s Justice for Change Partnership

Justice for Change is a cornerstone of Acorn’s work as it allows the team to provide Relativity access to organizations that are making a positive impact through cases related to racial and social injustice.

Lia Majid: “You specifically and your firm also are involved in Relativity’s Justice for Change program. When you think about Justice for Change, what does it mean to you?”

Jen Doran: “What really struck me about the Justice for Change program is that it went beyond your traditional understanding of what pro bono work means. We understand that many firms have pro bono practices where they dedicate time and resources to helping those who might not otherwise be able to engage a high-powered law firm. But the difference with Relativity’s Justice for Change program is that it specifically targets individuals who might not otherwise have the ability to incorporate the tools required to pursue litigation.”

Lia Majid: “A lot of people don’t think about the data aspect of pro bono work because data can be used as a tool. Document dumps are a strategy that some attorneys use as they try to drown the other side in documents. How do you think Justice for Change helps take away the advantage of those with access to resources that are engaging in document dump strategies?”

Jen Doran: “There sometimes will be calls for pro bono lawyers to come to airports, or come to clinics or various places, and people are able to dedicate their time, but that doesn’t mean they’re able to dedicate [the cost of] an eDiscovery platform or artificial intelligence tools or any of the other resources that might really help bring the case to fruition. Thankfully, Relativity has seen that need and has dedicated resources to helping those that require access to justice to get what they need.” 

MoloLamken’s Tools for Success

Lia Majid: “Have you worked with service partners before?”

Jen Doran: “There are two types of relationships that really matter to us. There is certainly when our data is being hosted by an outside vendor, and they are providing the platform. But there are also vendors who present products where we are fully capable of performing the work in a self-service model. Both of those relationships are critical because I am a lawyer, not an engineer, and I do not know how to build a machine. I love that depending on what the case needs, we have both of those types of partnerships available to us and we have great vendors out there.”

It is always exciting to see AI innovators discuss the importance of this technology and the way that it will continue to change in the future. Jen is a perfect example of an AI expert who flows with the ever-changing nature of the industry and urges others to continue to gain knowledge of it as well. Through her work at MoloLamken, along with partnering with Acorn through Relativity’s Justice for Change program, experts like Jen are well-equipped to be pioneers of this rapidly advancing technology and prepared to help clients on a larger scale.

Be sure to follow Lia and Jen to stay informed on their evolving perspectives of the changes in AI as they continue to navigate and lead others in the field.

David & Goliath: Understanding Mid-Sized vs. Large Law Firms’ Needs

Mid-sized law firms face unique challenges when it comes to eDiscovery. Although they may have eDiscovery-oriented personnel within their team, it can pale in comparison to firms of larger scale. This can create an undue burden that requires significantly more time to complete this phase of litigation. Unfortunately, this is often valuable time that could be deployed elsewhere in the case.

Due to the growing scale of cases, along with varying caseloads, I focus my expertise on mid-sized law firms’ specific needs when assisting my clients. The key here is understanding that the budgets, timelines, and challenges being faced aren’t one-size-fits-all. A few thousand, or tens of thousands of documents may not seem daunting to some but can create real challenges that we can’t just throw bodies or money at. That’s why I strive to empower my clients to level the playing field and meet the challenges of eDiscovery eye to eye. This can come in a variety of forms but can be seen through pairing firms with industry-leading expertise and developing tailored, cost-effective workflows that will allow them to save both time and money.

Varying Caseloads

One of the main differences between mid-sized and larger law firms is the scale of the cases they handle. Large law firms routinely work on high-profile and complex cases that involve vast amounts of data. In contrast, mid-sized firms may handle a diverse range of cases, from small businesses to individual clientele. As a result, their eDiscovery needs vary and require more focus on efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and simplicity.

The size and scale of a case can have a significant impact on mid-sized law firms’ eDiscovery practices. High volumes of data were once reserved for “larger” case sizes, but we are now seeing that change. Clients and businesses possess more data sources than ever before, all of which may be potentially relevant. In turn, the time required to process, filter, review, and analyze the data is growing as well, potentially impacting the firm’s ability to meet tight deadlines and efficiently allocate resources for other cases.

To combat this, mid-sized firms require scalable, and more importantly, flexible solutions that can adapt to their variety of caseloads, while still providing superior service and budget-friendliness.

This may sound like having your cake and eating it too, but it shouldn’t be, and isn’t anymore. Partnerships allow for expertise and technology to be more accessible than ever so that no matter the case, you can have 15+ years of eDiscovery experience and software, like RelativityOne, in your arsenal.

Less Manpower

Due to mid-sized firms often having fewer resources and manpower compared to larger firms, this can impact their ability to take on cases with large-scale eDiscovery components. This may result in passing on these cases, clients looking to move to larger firms, or stretching resources thin to try to accommodate the case’s needs. Often, we assist in counteracting this by providing the ability to outsource some aspects of eDiscovery as needed.

The mid-sized law firms I work with rely on our team’s specialized expertise to manage large volumes of electronic data. By outsourcing their eDiscovery providers, firms can save time and resources, as well as access advanced tools and methodologies that may not be cost-effective to purchase or develop in-house. At Acorn, we strive to understand our client’s unique needs and routinely develop specific custom scripts and workflows to assist mid-sized law firms in even further time savings. One example of this is our Acorn’s eDiscovery BackOffice™ Mass Export Natives solution, which allows users to mass export native files using a common workflow that they are already familiar with. It’s not a flashy-high tech solution on the surface, but it addressed a specific time-consuming need our clients faced every day.

Partnerships are one way to empower mid-sized law firms to effectively handle complex litigation matters, meet tight deadlines, and ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Additionally, having access to a team behind you that is dedicated to providing tailored, scalable solutions enables mid-sized law firms to make any matter manageable.

Access to Technology

Mid-sized firms may not only have less access to manpower to complete eDiscovery, but also face less access to advanced, or even any, eDiscovery technologies and tools that larger firms use routinely. This could be due to budgetary constraints as the cost of acquiring and maintaining eDiscovery technology can be high. This creates an additional challenge for mid-sized firms, as larger law firms often have dedicated IT departments and allocated budgets that allow them to invest, implement, and justify the expense of advanced eDiscovery tools more easily. Mid-sized firms may also face a mixed client base and a lower volume of eDiscovery-oriented cases, making the need for eDiscovery technology less pressing.

It is for this reason that Acorn worked with mid-sized law firms to develop our Small Case Solution. The solution allows firms access to eDiscovery technology, like RelativityOne, on a smaller scale and budget, but that can also scale with cases should they grow. This solution makes it easy for mid-sized firms to test eDiscovery technology and see how it can be beneficial for specific cases or practices without large investments upfront. Not every client can take on thousands of dollars in costs, and that shouldn’t be the defining barrier to having access to the technology and expertise that their case needs.

Final Thoughts

Due to the unique challenges mid-sized law firms face, our team at Acorn specifically works with firms of this size to address their eDiscovery workflows in an efficient and realistic manner. Collaborating with experts like Acorn can be beneficial for mid-sized firms that don’t have eDiscovery-oriented personnel with experience handling complex eDiscovery matters. As volumes of electronic data involved in legal cases have exceptionally increased, and continue to do so, it has become more challenging to efficiently manage and analyze this information without specialized knowledge. But it shouldn’t be this way, and this is why I specifically focus on firms of this size to ensure that they can wrap their arms around their data and the eDiscovery process. Helping them every step of the way to stand up to Goliath.

If you have a question about a case or would like to learn more about how to efficiently run your eDiscovery, please feel free to reach out to me at Luke.Riddle@AcornLS.com.

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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 Effectively Run a Review: Putting It All Together

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

To recap, we first identified the two hidden cost drivers of review, throughput and rework, that can secretly cause review budgets to escalate. Secondly, we identified how an effective project ramp-up and successful review management led to cost reductions of up to approximately 30%. Lastly, we identified how proper reviewer optimization and coding consistencies can increase the number of documents reviewed by 30%, thus leading to further cost savings.

Individually, we can see that each one of our choices throughout the review led to notable savings over the life of the case. In today’s exercise, we will look back at all the opportunities 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 from. In this scenario, we have 100,000 documents that need to be reviewed, with 15,000 documents needing to be re-reviewed (reworked) at a review throughput rate of 40 docs/hour, at a $42/hour rate. With these rework and throughput rates accounted for, this results in 115,000 effective documents reviewed.

Putting It All Together

So, what happens when you put it all together? If we optimize our review team and effectively manage their work throughout the project, utilizing technology such as batching strategies and coding consistencies, what’s the net impact of that in economic terms?

The “Perfect” Review Setup

Let’s start with our review team. In the example above, we see that having an efficient review team that has been properly trained results in the number of documents reviewed increasing by 6 additional documents/hour. Just by being strategic on who you pick for your review team will lower the number of documents that need to be reworked by 12%. This shows how small tweaks to your review project from the beginning can lower the overall cost of the budget by almost 20%! 

However, reducing review costs doesn’t stop at the beginning of the project. To consistently reduce review costs, monitoring your review team throughout the process becomes increasingly important. Using reports and statistics to actively monitor your team will show you how many documents reviewers are coding per hour, as well as the overall pace of the project. 

Let’s say, for example, you have six reviewers on a project and the standard norm for reviewers is roughly 40-50 documents an hour. Like the example below, you may have one rockstar reviewer that is reviewing 90 docs/hour, have some reviewers who are reviewing in the 40-45 range, one reviewer that is a little bit below the bar, and two reviewers that are way below the average. 

In managing this team, you may choose to coach reviewer 1, cut reviewers number 2 and 3 since they are below average, and flag reviewer 6 to peek at later to make sure that their coding is consistent.

If you were to make this decision to cut reviewers 2 and 3 in this scenario, although the weeks to complete the review may increase by 1.3 weeks, the throughput of the reviewers is also increasing from 40 documents/hour up to 53 documents/hour. 

Even though this sample review project was extended for an additional week, it still allowed for a decrease in costs. By reducing the team, it increased documents reviewed to 53 from 40, aka 13 more documents an hour, and lowered rework by 6% which is a 30% reduction on total cost. 

Fine Tuning the Review Process

So, you have your review team, but you want to see what you can do to get the review moving quicker. Tech strategies like persistent highlighting – not just of privilege documents that hit on a privilege term, but also those that hit on one of the agreed upon terms, can help the review team identify the terms quickly. Rather than just batching out documents for a review based on hits, it’s best to think about how to batch out more strategically to reduce costs.

As you can see in this example, by doing something as simple as batching strategically, you can increase the number of documents reviewed by 30%, lower the quality control by 3% and in this example, lower the cost of review by $30k.

The last cost driver in review deals with coding consistency. This refers to the ways we can keep coding consistent and thus reduce how many documents that may need to be re-reviewed because of coding inconsistencies.  

By leveraging techniques such as streamlining the coding panel, utilizing dashboards, and engaging active learning, you can capture potential issues and inconsistencies in real time before they spiral into a huge problem. In this example, although the number of documents reviewed did not change, the percentage of rework dropped by almost 10%. This also lowered the total cost of review by almost $10K.

The End Is in Sight

Now it’s time to reap the fruits of our labor. So, let’s move into our review budget and look at how these strategic, incremental changes to your project reduce risks of inconsistencies that can affect the quality and costs of your review. 

Throughout our project, we saw several reductions through these techniques. However, each of these are separate tactics, and if we were to subtract all the percentage reductions we found in our review budget, we would end up with diminishing returns. What we do see though, are substantial savings. Looking at all of these techniques together, if you are looking at 100,000 documents to be reviewed using a throughput of 60 docs/hour, and your rework goes from 15% to 5%, then you’re now only reviewing 105,000 effective documents, and your budget substantially decreases from $120,000 to $73,000.

Now, we live in a world where we have to find people who can do this work and who are skilled at it. Paying these reviewers $42/hour may be ambitious, so we must determine what number we would be willing to pay our contract reviewers under the strategic workflow that gets us to the same price so that we can reach a middle ground.

Running the numbers, we found that this number would be $69/hour. So, if we’re really strategic and pay a reviewer $69/hour, we will come out to about the same place as if we were to be less strategic and going for cheaper reviewers. Obviously, paying $69/hour isn’t necessarily always going to be the case, and the right dollar amount is usually somewhere in the middle of $42/hour and $69/hour.

This is also a good framework to use when needing to explain why choosing a reviewer with more expertise would actually benefit the client and the team.

Predictable, Certain, and Stress Free

This scenario goes against the belief that if we want to reduce the budget, we’re going to have to give up on quality. The truth is that if you run a good process, you can win on quality and cost at the same time.

We’ve seen that these same techniques are going to result in a reduced error rate and increased quality, so less of your documents will be miscoded. There is a cost to poor quality, and as we continue to use these techniques, quality is going to improve. The attorneys, the client, and everyone involved will have much less stress about the process because we will know what our assumptions are, what our milestones are that we need to hit to make our budget and deadline. We’ll know in week one, week two, and week three of the review whether we’re on target or falling behind, and if we’re falling behind, and can get ahead of it by communicating what has changed with the client from our expectations, or communicating with opposing counsel on what has changed. This allows us to not be subject to the mercy of document review and to start to gain control over the process resulting in a much better overall experience.

If you have an upcoming review project and are interested in learning more about Acorn’s review services, feel free to contact us at Info@AcornLS.com.

Relativity’s Translate Tool: First Look at the Use Cases & Considerations from Director of Advanced Analytics, Josh Treat

What is Translate and Why Does It Matter?  

In today’s world, businesses operate on a global scale which has made multi-language document collections more and more common in discovery matters. RelativityOne’s Translate tool promises reviewers a best in-class solution to seamlessly and securely translate documents without ever leaving the platform, saving teams both time and money while also reducing risk.

Strategies Prior to Relativity Translate

In the past, Acorn has relied on third-party tools to accommodate our client’s translation needs with varying levels of success. Vetting new tools, negotiating pricing, transferring data back and forth, and invoicing has been cumbersome and often led to unexpected delays. With translation capabilities embedded directly into RelativityOne, this simplifies our process while also creating more efficient and secure workflows for our clients. Translate has allowed our clients to:

Translate documents to over 100 languages as they review without any long delays.
View translated documents in their native format preserving important context.
Translate multi-language documents with one pass without having to identify the source language.
Reduce risk by eliminating the need to transfer documents to/from third parties.

Relativity Translate Use Cases

At Acorn, we generally use translation tools as part of our first pass review. The ability to quickly identify, translate, search/filter and conduct a preliminary review on multi-language collections without ever leaving RelativityOne has really streamlined our review process. With many translations available in native format, even if not perfect, our review teams are able to utilize the translation in tandem formats to help determine relevance. Review is expensive, especially for expert reviewers who are proficient across multiple languages, so cutting down on the number of documents that need a second pass review has led to significant cost and time savings for our clients.

Pitfalls of Relativity Translate

When working with tools like RelativityOne’s Translate, the first thing to keep in mind is rarely are the translations going to be perfect. Even with continuous advancements in technology, there are several considerations and potential pitfalls to watch out for. Here are a few key items to keep in mind which may affect the accuracy of your translations:

Ambiguity: Many words and phrases have multiple meanings, and context is often required to determine the correct translation.
Idioms and Cultural Nuances: Idioms, cultural references, and linguistic nuances can be difficult to translate accurately. These elements often don’t have direct equivalents in other languages, leading to awkward or incorrect translations.
Complex Documents: Translation of complex documents, such as legal or technical documents, due to the specialized vocabulary and terminology used in these types of texts can be troublesome.
OCR Accuracy: OCR documents in foreign languages may be inaccurate as the tool may not pick up on accent marks on letters. If there are typos within a document, those may also affect the accuracy of the translation.

If you would like to learn more or see a demo of Relativity Translate, please feel free to reach out to me at Josh.Treat@AcornLS.com. I am also happy to discuss how this technology may work for your case, or exchange thoughts on what other technology in the market may fit your situation.   

About Josh: 

As a seasoned litigation support specialist with 15+ years of experience, Josh has saved millions of dollars in review costs through the development of proprietary assisted review workflows in a variety of platforms. Josh has been involved in numerous landmark cases that leverage Advanced Analytics. In addition, Josh leverages quantitative forecasting and rigorous, best-in-class project management tools for on-time, under-budget completion of complex litigation review. He speaks fluent geek, salesperson, trainer, and difficult client. As a result, Josh has a unique ability to help manage and navigate large complex projects with creative custom solutions to meet any budget or timeline requirements. Josh is a Certified Relativity Master and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information Systems from Central Michigan University. 

About Acorn: 

Announcing Acorn’s Justice for Change Partnership with Goldberg Kohn

Acorn Legal Solutions Establishes Pro Bono Hosting Partnership through Relativity’s Justice for Change

Acorn will support Justice for Change grant recipients in their use of RelativityOne

CHICAGO, IL – July 17, 2023 – Acorn Legal Solutions, a woman-led eDiscovery firm headquartered in Chicago, today announced its designation as a Hosting Partner with Relativity’s Justice for Change program. This partnership will enable Acorn to provide hosting, administrative and project management support to grant recipient organizations in their use of RelativityOne.

“We are proud to be a Hosting Partner of the Justice for Change program as it fosters an opportunity for us to have a positive impact on racial and social justice in our communities,” said Lia Majid, CEO at Acorn Legal Solutions. “I am grateful that our team can make a difference by democratizing access to eDiscovery technology and providing support for those organizations in need of it.”

Acorn will be partnering with Chicago-based commercial law firm Goldberg Kohn to provide hosting and production of documents related to a case of toxic contamination in a predominantly minority community. Acorn will help the Goldberg Kohn team to manage and organize a large volume of documents using RelativityOne to present as evidence to the court.

Relativity’s Justice for Change program focuses on increasing access to justice by providing free use of its cloud-based e-discovery product, RelativityOne, to organizations tackling legal cases and academic and policy research related to racial and social justice. Specifically, Justice for Change has allocated 100TB of RelativityOne data to be used on pro bono projects led by customers or nonprofit organizations. Through the Justice for Change hosting partnership, Acorn is committed to the continuous pursuit of justice through great pro bono work and building important connections with Goldberg Kohn.

“We are grateful that Acorn is providing access to RelativityOne in order to defend our clients’ case and shed light on other instances where minority communities in particular are negatively impacted by environmental harms,” said Rachel Steiner, who is counsel at Goldberg Kohn. “The ability to use this technology will not only help our current clients but can show other individuals in similar situations that limited resources should not prevent them from accessing the justice they deserve.”

Acorn will work with Goldberg Kohn using RelativityOne to migrate their data from its current Relativity Server database and organize their files for evidence. Their data consists of PDFs, native files, and Concordance load file productions, that will be hosted and produced.

“Just as transitioning to the cloud will play a crucial role in helping Goldberg Kohn to more easily pursue justice on behalf of their clients, the partnership between these two Chicago-based companies will facilitate justice within the larger local community and beyond,” said Johnathan Hill, Community Engagement Lead at Relativity. “We are happy to see Acorn Legal extend their involvement with Justice for Change and are excited to welcome Goldberg Kohn into the Justice for Change community.”

Organizations, including current Relativity customers, doing legal work on behalf of racial justice that would benefit from software to help them build out a case narrative can apply for free use of our cloud-based e-discovery product, RelativityOne. To learn more, visit: https://www.relativity.com/company/giving-back/justice-for-change/

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. Although capable of serving AmLaw 100 Law Firms and Corporate Legal departments, Acorn primarily works with large regional, midsize national and boutique litigation firms. Acorn provides high-touch, customized litigation support services with a heavy emphasis on seamless communications.

About Goldberg Kohn

Goldberg Kohn Ltd. is a commercial law firm located in Chicago with principal concentrations in business litigation, commercial finance, creditors’ rights and bankruptcy, corporate transactions, federal and state taxation, intellectual property, labor and employment, and real estate.

About Relativity

Relativity makes software to help users organize data, discover the truth and act on it. Its SaaS product, RelativityOne, manages large volumes of data and quickly identifies key issues during litigation and internal investigations. Relativity has more than 300,000 users in approximately 40 countries serving thousands of organizations globally primarily in legal, financial services and government sectors, including the U.S. Department of Justice and 198 of the Am Law 200. Please contact Relativity at sales@relativity.com or visit www.relativity.com for more information.

How to Effectively Run a Review: Proper Reviewer Optimization & Coding Consistencies

Continuing on the subject of review, the largest cost driver within the EDRM, it must be reiterated that reducing review costs doesn’t stop at the beginning of the project. To consistently reduce review costs, hidden burdens such as rework and throughput must be addressed throughout your review.

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

Thus far, we’ve analyzed the hidden cost drivers of review and successful project ramp up in reducing total costs of review (TCR). Today, let’s see how we can further streamline our review and reduce our total costs through reviewer optimization and coding consistencies.

Establishing the Numbers 

Let’s recap the assumptions we will continue to work off of. In this scenario, we have 100,000 documents that need to be reviewed, with 15,000 documents needing to be re-reviewed (reworked) at a review throughput rate of 40 docs/hour, at a $42/hour rate. With these rework and throughput rates accounted for, this results in 115,000 effective documents reviewed. 

In our previous article, How to Effectively Run a Review: Reduce Overall Costs by Up to 30% with Successful Project Ramp Up & Management, we took this same scenario and looked at how optimizing your review team from the start and effectively managing your team throughout the project can have significant cost savings. We found that, through this, we were able to produce significant cost savings – upwards of 30 percent.

In today’s exercise, the last question we’ll visit here is: What technology optimizations can you make throughout the review project that will increase cost savings?

Fine Tuning the Review Process

In our previous Groundhog Day webinar, Senior Project Advisor Robin LeDonne discussed enhancements that can be made to increase the speed of any review project, “You have your review team, but you want to see what you can do to get the review moving quicker” Robin stated. Tech strategies like persistent highlighting – not just of privilege documents that hit on a privilege term, but also those that hit on one of the agreed upon terms, can help the review team identify the terms quickly. Rather than just batching out documents for a review based on hits, it’s best to think about how to batch out more strategically, such as:

Keeping contextually similar documents batched together
Batching by chronology and/or custodian

If the documents can be reviewed in this way, it turns the review into more of a story which will help the team not only with reviewing the docs but in creating a strategy for how the overall case can be handled or tried. 

It is also important to think through the coding panel. We have found the best results are to keep it as simple as possible, with well-defined coding descriptions. It is ideal, if possible, to leave the hot document determination to the subject matter experts and then look for similar documents, “I’ve been on projects where the team says when you run across a hot document, go ahead and tag it, but what I’ve seen happen is one of two things: every document is suddenly tagged ‘hot’ or ‘key’ or nothing is tagged,” Robin explained.

Can These Optimizations Be Backed Up?

As you can see, by doing something as simple as batching strategically, you can increase the number of documents reviewed by 30%, lower the quality control by 3% and in this example, lower the cost of review by $30k.  

How Can We Keep Coding Consistent?

The last cost driver in review deals with coding consistency. This refers to the ways we can keep coding consistent and thus, reduce how many documents that may need to be re-reviewed because of coding inconsistencies. 

The structure of how the coding panel is set up can determine whether it is streamlined and if it flows based on what reviewers should be searching for within the document. An example would be to have “the must have on every reviewed document” tag near the top of the coding panel, “I personally like using nested choices and event handlers, such as ensuring a choice is made by a reviewer before moving on to the next document,” Robin stated.

Dashboards are also ideal to catch issues before they become a significant QC problem. Dashboards track real time review progress and can help in finding any reviewers that may need additional coaching on the material. They can also let us know more about the data we are reviewing, such as whether the data collected is behaving as anticipated – i.e., if it is relevant and if it pertains to the anticipated issue. By catching issues in real time, this allows the team more flexibility to pivot and hone in on what matters most.

“I am also a huge advocate of having an active learning project that runs in the background as a QC step whenever possible. This is especially helpful when there is a subject matter expert that can review the seed documents, effectively teaching the computer prior to the review teams’ review,” said Robin. 

Custom indexing in Relativity also allows each workspace to be tailored for the needs of the case, all the way down to what will be searched and which data will be ignored. By tailoring the search index to include a word or character, you will be able to get rid of false hits on terms, thus lowering the total documents to be reviewed. 

What Do the Numbers Say?

By leveraging these techniques, such as streamlining the coding panel, utilizing dashboards, and engaging active learning, you can capture potential issues and inconsistencies in real time before they spiral into a huge problem. In this example, although the number of documents reviewed did not change, the percentage of rework dropped by almost 10%. This also lowered the total cost of review by almost $10K.

How You Can Apply This 

Through making strategic, incremental changes to your reviewer batching strategies and coding consistencies, you can see how these small changes can affect the quality and costs of your review. While it is important to plan ahead and create an effective review team, using these tech strategies can further amplify your review by boosting reviewer efficiency, leading to less errors and larger cost savings.

Stay tuned for next month as we continue this exercise and put all of these techniques together to see how we can reduce our total review costs! 

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About Acorn

3 Risks to Consider When Spreading Data Across Multiple Vendors

The old saying goes – “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” but what about in the case of consolidating your data?

When working with my clients, it’s important for me to debunk this ever so common myth that moving their data to one vendor is “too risky.” Often, moving a project to one vendor can come with many benefits, especially if it is a vendor who is knowledgeable, certified, and secure.

If you find yourself in a situation where your data is scattered among several places, in today’s day and age, it is important to have information governance practices in place to keep your data safe. Many of the frequent data security issues can be avoided by consolidating your data with a vendor that has trusted project managers who are certified in their technology. Some of the risks you may face with consolidating your data among multiple vendors include:

1. Increased chance of working with a team who is not as experienced or certified. 

As the amount of data businesses generate continues to grow exponentially, managing and accessing it effectively has become increasingly challenging. With so many different eDiscovery vendors available, it can be tempting to spread your data across multiple platforms to avoid vendor lock-in. However, this can unfortunately increase the risk of lost data.

By choosing one, certified and experienced vendor to consolidate your data to, you can keep all your data organized in a central place with a single point of contact. An experienced vendor like Acorn will ensure that your data is safe every step of the process, and will manage communications, expectations, and training that align to your litigation needs. Smaller vendors may also have more niche expertise and focus within a particular industry or practice area, allowing them to provide a more targeted, specialized approach.

Your vendor should also guarantee your data’s integrity so that data is consolidated as a whole, with all work-product retained, and immediate access granted. It is important to make sure you don’t simply choose a larger vendor due to their size as you’ll need to consider your relationship with the vendor. At Acorn, personal communication with our clients is essential so that they are informed throughout the process every step of the way.

2. Downstream troubles associated with consolidating your data to more than one vendor.

Consolidating all your data with one eDiscovery vendor can provide numerous benefits by helping to simplify your data management. First, having all your data in one place can help you more efficiently monitor your data and quickly turn around document productions. You’ll also gain greater visibility into your data, allowing you to develop a more comprehensive understanding of potential compliance risks or areas where improvements can be made.

If your data is scattered amongst multiple vendors, there is a higher chance of downtime with your projects. It is important to work with one vendor who can work with stakeholders to determine optimal downtime scheduling, while working around your litigation needs and timeline. Choosing a smaller vendor like Acorn allows you to work with a team that is more agile and able to adapt to changing trends and advancements in technology more quickly than larger vendors, who may be burdened by legacy systems and bureaucracy. This can result in faster turnaround times, improved accuracy and efficiency of data processing, and better overall project management.

3. Higher pricing structure involved with consolidating data between multiple vendors.

Additionally, working with a single vendor can help you save on costs, as you’ll be able to negotiate a more favorable pricing structure for a larger volume of data. By providing the vendor with a larger volume of data to manage, you can increase the value you bring to the table and potentially negotiate more favorable rates. Choosing a smaller vendor that has a more personalized approach to customer service and more flexible pricing options can be particularly beneficial, especially for small to medium-sized businesses.

Moreover, dealing with multiple vendors can be time-consuming and can lead to increased communication costs. Coordinating with different vendors, managing multiple contracts, and performing multiple quality assurance checks can take up valuable resources and incur additional expenses. By consolidating your data with a single vendor, you can streamline these processes and reduce costs associated with coordinating with multiple vendors.

Finally, consolidating your data with a single vendor can help to reduce the risks associated with managing multiple vendors. With a single vendor, you can establish a closer working relationship and ensure that your data is being managed consistently and securely. This can result in cost savings associated with mitigating risks and ensuring your data’s integrity.