In eDiscovery, we maintain many bad habits from the pre-digital age.
However, we have lost sight of one great habit: a preliminary walkthrough
of boxes containing material potentially relevant for disclosure.
This ritual gave the discovery team a chance to get the lay of the land.
The team could get a general sense of the boxes’ contents, begin to
understand how the materials were organized, and start to prioritize
efforts to understand and handle the materials. Boxes containing
interesting documents got moved to the front of the line. Boxes of lesser
interest were assigned a lower priority, to be returned to as time, need,
and resources permitted. The lowest priority boxes were probably never
looked at again—time or money ran out or the team decided they had
found enough pertinent materials to meet their needs.
Just as we walked through paper documents in the past, today we
should do walk-throughs of electronically stored information (ESI).
ESI walk-throughs need to be done quite differently, as it poses
challenges and offers opportunities we never faced with paper.
The volumes of ESI involved in discovery today make this task
impossible without the use of technology. But many legal professionals
seem to think early case assessment (ECA) and technology assisted
review (TAR)—specifically, technologies like predictive coding—are
essentially the same thing. However, these three-letter acronyms have
very little in common. Predictive coding is in fact least suitable for ECA
but many other technologies can do a much better job of helping you
get an early understanding of your data and what to do with it.
In this paper, we will examine four kinds of analytics—statistical, date,
textual and relationship—and five practical ways you can apply them in
early case assessment. These techniques can give you a much clearer,
more accurate, and comprehensive view of the issues at hand and the
potential pitfalls you will need to avoid, at the earliest possible stages
of the discovery process.
By Guest Blogger: Nuix
