Almost every dispute matter involves the identification, collection, review and management of large volumes of electronic documents resulting in discovery costs that can amount to up to 70% of the total costs of a matter. eDiscovery is the process during which electronic data is identified, secured, searched and later reviewed so that it is available as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. The management of these volumes for investigation and discovery purposes requires the right legal and technological expertise, cost-effective resourcing options, experience of best practice electronic discovery processes and appropriate technology.
Case study
legal project management
+ alternative resourcing
+ legal technology
A litigation matter for an insolvency inquiry required the review of 20.5GB (approximately 60,000 files) of emails and attachments. A second tranche of 20GB was made available to our legal team for review only two weeks ahead of the inquiry.
Solution
The Legal Services Centre was able to assist by processing and transferring the data onto an eDiscovery platform. Once on the platform, the legal team, with support from the Legal Services Centre, was able to view and categorise the emails following a predefined review approach.
The second tranche of documents required urgent review. To reduce the volumes of data, the Legal Services Centre produced an Early Data Assessment (EDA) report providing insight into file extensions, authors and domain names, enabling the legal project manager to quickly exclude irrelevant documents and documents already reviewed.
The Commissioner of the inquiry, and the opponent received relevant documents in electronic format and witness bundles were assembled quickly and easily by paralegals using the platform's search, pagination and production functionality.
The platform was also used by our legal team during the inquiry to locate documents referred to in the testimony easily.
Outcomes
Review time on the first tranche of documents was reduced by 30% and review of the second tranche of documents was reduced by 50% using the EDA report. Document collation and bundling time was reduced by an estimated, 75% and printing costs were eliminated.
