RAND Study on Electronic Discovery Costs

A RAND study, The Cost of Producing Electronic Documents in Civil Lawsuits, provides some insight into how much businesses are spending on electronic discovery.

It confirms that Review continues to be the most expensive stage of electronic discovery, and that most of the spending goes for work performed by outside counsel.

RAND concludes that the highest number of documents that a person can review in an hour is about 100, and it's not likely that this rate can be improved upon. Email threading; clustering; and near-duplicate detection will not necessarily allow for major improvements in review time.

The study also emphasizes the inconsistent decisions made by human reviewers. "In one case, for example, seven teams of attorneys, all trained in a similar manner and given the same instructions, examined 28,000 documents organized into 12,000 clusters to judge whether the clusters were responsive to the facts of the case. Results showed that the teams agreed only 23 to 54 percent of the time, depending on the pair of teams being compared.". It recommends predictive coding as an alternative.

Overview of Email in Viewpoint

Elite Discovery's Viewpoint platform has a relationship analyzer which can provide metrics on email data. In the analyzer, a list of domains is shown in the left pane, and a list of individuals is shown on the right. The respective tables will show how many outgoing and ingoing emails are available for each domain and individual.

Clicking on an individual name will pull up another pane which will have multiple tabs listing all of the email addresses associated with the individual; the email addresses of the individuals that this selected individual has exchanged messages with; and a line graph plotting the number of emails including the selected individual across a date range.

The analyzer will also create a circular schematic which shows how emails are exchanged between domains and individuals. Each domain is designated with a color on the outer rim of the circle. Hovering over the inner rim of the circle will make captions pop up showing a specific email address. Lines across the center of the circle visualize communications between different domains and users.

The relations map has blocks for each domain which are sized to reflect their proportion of emails in the system. It's possible to drill down to an individual email level with similarly proportioned blocks. Color coding is used to show how most of the emails for an individual have been coded for relevancy.

It's possible to QC the coding decisions by right clicking an individual block in the chart, and selecting 'Build View', an option which is available on the other tabs as well.

Hold and Data Preservation Notices

The 2021 edition of the Thomson Reuters Electronic Discovery and Records and Information Management Guide provides checklists for legal holds and preservation notices. It’s interesting to compare the recommendations in this textbook against the tips suggested by two Zapproved employees based on experience, which was discussed in last night’s tip.

Here are some tips left out last night:

- take steps to preserve native files and metadata.

- image a backup of any relevant digital media.

- don’t redeploy hardware which may contain relevant data.

- “Forbid forensically naive network administrators or other members of the information technology department from

checking out or otherwise investigating relevant devices.” Id. at 244.

- State the name of the case, the venue, and the causes of action

- state the business relationship between the requesting party and the company.

- instruct that the current retention schedule be suspended.