Thought Leadership and Industry Trends
How should discovery practitioners prepare for parsing and reviewing the next generation of digital documents from chat and collaboration tools, ticketing systems and mobile devices.
Visualizations drive smarter workflows, more efficient classification and better QC so eDiscovery projects stay on time and on budget. Part I of a three-part blog series reviews how data visualizations equip eDiscovery practitioners to take control of a data explosion.
The pandemic has tested us personally, professionally and organizationally. Successfully transitioning to this new reality required certain immediate, practical adjustments that not every employee, leader or company could reasonably make.
In March 2017, Microsoft launched its online chat and collaboration tool Microsoft Teams. By the end of 2018, ~3 million users utilized Teams on a daily basis, growing to ~44 million users by February 2020. Microsoft Teams wasn’t alone on its upward trajectory; competing applications such as Facebook Workplaces and Slack have seen similar growth.
In the U.S., the ABA has estimated that document review alone accounts for more than 80 percent of total litigation spend, totaling tens of billions of dollars per year. As data becomes more varied and complex and volumes increase, that number is only going to rise. The dominance of social media, the increased use of short form multichannel messaging platforms, and even the growing popularity of podcasts have only widened the scope of what is considered fair game for discovery.
Early Case Assessment (ECA) enables law firms and companies to significantly reduce costs by eliminating non-relevant data while providing valuable insight into data sets early in the discovery process. While ECA tools and methods have become more mainstream in the last few years, there are still many features and benefits that are not well-known or understood.
Data analytics tools such as those provided by Relativity Analytics offer the means to make document review more efficient and accurate, which ultimately saves corporations and law firms time and money.
Long before starting formal discovery, an internal investigation should be launched so a party and their counsel can understand and assess the information ecosystem, identify sources of potentially relevant information and examine these sources via sampling. Although a litigant may not be required to produce the information found, it is crucial that pre-litigation investigation be handled appropriately to ensure it is accurate.
Relativity provides many helpful features that improve the eDiscovery review process, including Early Case Assessment and Data Analytics.
Redaction is one of the most time-consuming tasks in eDiscovery, requiring manual review of documents to black out sensitive information. However, technology tools do exist to make it easier. These are especially helpful with Excel spreadsheets, which are difficult to work with if converted into an image file. Redacting in native Excel is preferable but does present its own challenges if the right technology is not used.
Virtually every company will need to collect and/or transfer data from one location to another at some point. While this may seem to be a routine matter, there are dangers, particularly when it comes to eDiscovery.
As eDiscovery tools evolve, they are addressing a broader array of workflow issues. Project managers, law firms and companies can make use of new features to help them with all aspects of document review and production as well as for deposition and trial preparation.
