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:
- 500GB of email = approximately 3,000,000 documents before culling
- 30 days to review and produce to DOJ
- Large volume of duplicate documents
- Chosen vendor was already overloaded
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:
- The 500GB of MS Outlook PSTs reduced by 70% to 900,000 unique documents
- The responsive documents produced 1,000,000 pages produced to the DOJ
- Although received in batches, the entire data was processed in less than two weeks
- After matching up all the Attenex/Logik records, production to DOJ took less than one week
- The client made the tight deadline with room to spare
- Although already over-budget, we kept the costs low with our predictable pricing
- Tasty frosty beverages continue to be served around the world
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!