A case study in best practice approach using eDiscovery to responding to a summons to produce records.
Problem
How do you quickly collect and review documents from a client in order to respond to a court summons to produce documents within 10 days?
What happens when the client is in a regional location preventing electronic transfer of files due to internet speed?
How eDiscovery Collab Solved the Problem
The first decision made was that the most efficient way to identify the documents responsive to the summons was to collect all of the client’s business and iPhone records and ingest them into a litigation database for searching.
This approach raised an initial obstacle of obtaining the records from the client. Based in regional Queensland, the internet speed was insufficient to upload documents in a timely manner.
eDiscovery Collab worked out it would take more than 5 days to upload the documents.
The solution was for the client to copy the business records onto a hard drive then drive them to a meeting point for personal collection by one of the eDiscovery Collab team.
This process raised different security risks but it was the only way to get the data to eDiscovery Collab fast enough to be ingested into the litigation database and leave enough time for legal review.
- The client’s records after ingestion numbered 403,812.
- Deduplication reduced the number of records to 203,492.
- By applying search criteria for custodians and keywords, the set was reduced to 67,604 documents for review by the law firm.
The documents were ready for review by the law firm within 1 day of collection.
The lawyers reviewed these documents for responsiveness against the summons and ultimately 4,360 documents were coded as relevant and produced to court in time.
Benefits of this Approach
Without the use of eDiscovery technology and the litigation database this review could not be achieved in the time available.
The technology allowed the lawyers to identify the relevant documents quickly and get access to that material in a matter of days.