Analytics Solution Enables Law Firm to Streamline Document Review
Overcoming Document Review Challenges
As part of a litigation, a leading law firm received over 80,000 documents from opposing counsel. The document set included approximately 19,000 emails. It was critical for the law firm to review these emails in order to understand the timeline of key communications relevant to the matter, which in turn was necessary for the firm to be adequately prepared to depose key witnesses.
There were two major challenges connected with the situation. One was that the emails were either missing or contained incomplete metadata. Unless this could be addressed, it would be virtually impossible to review the document set in order to identify emails that would help construct the key communication timelines that the firm needed in order to be ready for the witness depositions.
The second challenge was that the firm had a small legal team that was assigned to this fast-moving matter, as well as court-ordered deadlines that were quickly approaching. Initially the firm planned to conduct a linear document review of the 80,000 documents and code documents relevant to various deponents, but that task became insurmountable given the size of the legal team and the tight deadline.
Accelerating Document Review
The firm’s solution was to engage Canon Business Process Services, which deployed its analytics technology to accelerate the firm’s review of the production documents. Using metadata remediation through an email header identification system on the document images, Canon identified the missing or incomplete metadata. This approach either generates a new field or overwrites a field for documents with missing or incomplete metadata. The metadata remediation algorithm can add or overwrite up to six new fields, which include the following:
- Remediated Email Bcc
- Remediated Email Cc
- Remediated Email From
- Remediated Email Subject
- Remediated Email To
- Remediated Sent Date
Benefits
Canon’s solution enabled the firm’s legal team to find the vital information it needed essentially in minutes. This allowed the team to create a timeline of key communications and effectively prepare for the upcoming depositions. In addition to these benefits, the firm was able to eliminate the time, cost and resources typically associated with a linear document review.