Beer for eDiscovery

Beer for eDiscovery

Just the facts please

  • 500GB of PSTs
  • 70% cull rate
  • 900,000 documents reviewed
  • 1,000,000 pages produced
  • Less than 2 weeks to process
  • Less than 1 week to produce
  • Happy, happy client

Challenge:

Beer and eDiscovery go together like hops and barley.  Our law firm client had a large, very well known beverage company as a customer who was in the middle of a massive merger with another frosty beverage (beer) manufacturer. Then the DOJ handed them a rather large second request. Although these requests are extremely time-sensitive, clients can’t sacrifice quality over speed. This presents a rather difficult challenge for any company, especially if you are already over-budget on merger expenses.

The data in the request, about 500GB of Microsoft Outlook PSTs, was collected by the client. Since the client didn’t have enough time to limit the amount of redundancy while collecting the PSTs, duplicate emails and attachments slipped through the cracks, increasing the volume of data. In order to facilitate a speedy review, these duplicate documents needed to be pulled before review started.

Prior to the second request, the law firm had already contracted with an outside Attenex® provider for the processing, review and production. But their plate was already full and taking on another 500GB of email, which would very likely be hundreds of thousands if not millions of additional records, risked missing the DOJ deadline.

Although the 500GB of email needed to be loaded into Attenex, which provides a very fast way to review large sets of documents, our client turned to Logik for a solution to their time-critical issue.

So, what’s the problem:


What we did:

Logik has worked on fast-paced second requests before, so the incredibly tight turnaround wasn’t new to us, but the added Attenex element was an interesting twist we had little experience with. The client wanted us to process and reduce the data with Gridlogik™ and send only the unique parent emails in MSG format to the Attenex vendor. Ok, no problem. Then, our client requested on-going horizontal de-duplication (across the entire data set) to further reduce the data. Ok, no problem. Then they asked us if we could handle the TIFF productions to the DOJ, assuming we could match up the Attenex records with the Logik records. Again, no problem.

Gridlogik is excellent with record keeping (every single document Gridlogik processes is tracked with a unique Logik ID). This made it very easy for the Attenex provider to send us exported Attenex XML files after a batch of documents was ready for production. We took the Attenex XML and easily pared the exported records with the Logik records. The matching process was fast and successful.

The matched records were flagged, formatted and converted to TIFF for production to the DOJ. Since we setup the Concordance database according to strict DOJ specs, the client’s quality control process and subsequent production approval was quick and painless, and they easily met their deadline. That makes everyone happy.

The results:



It was tempting to ask for payment in a lifetime supply of quality beer for managing such a fast-paced and complex DOJ second request, but we chose the more conventional route and went with a check. Yes, it may seem more boring, but you can bet that check went to good use for the entire team. Cheers!

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Case Studies

Did you know?

  • That 7-zip compression software has a better compression ratio than WinRAR or WinZIP?

  • That you should use the newest version of Winzip to compress your files, because Winzip will automatically preserve file-level dates/times?

  • That Microsoft PPT files can contain hidden information behind text objects or layered pictures?

  • That a thorough data map can help you to implement your data retention policy, and can equip you for your “meet and confer” conference?

  • That Microsoft Word 97-2002 documents can contain deleted data hidden within the binary of the file if “allow fast saves” are enabled?

  • That there is no realistic way to redact native files without first converting the file to an image?

  • That Bloomberg email systems keeps attachments disconnected from the actual email and in a compressed .tar.gz file?

  • That many of the off-the-shelf eDiscovery programs can not detect the encoding of documents and thus can not properly handle foreign language character sets?

  • That search terms generally miss over 50% of would-be relevant content according to TREC?

  • That it would take a team of 1,000 attorneys 100 years to review a petabyte of information?

  • That many of the off-the-shelf eDiscovery programs can only extract a limited number of embedded files?

  • That Outlook Express .EML files can contain foreign language characters?

  • That MAPI = Messaging Application Programming Interface, and it allows access to email content and metadata?

  • That copying 5GB of tiny files is much slower than copying 1 large 5GB file?

  • That attorneys can be sanctioned for improperly handling eDiscovery processing?  Search for Bray & Gillespie.