Supporting the Big Bots
Just the facts please
- Sub to Top 3 accounting firm
- 250GBs of NSFs, PSTs, eDocs
- 50 custodians
- Hundreds of search terms
- New search software
- English and Spanish searches
- 3,000,000 docs pre search
- Dozens of search reports
- 900,000 docs post search
- Less than 2 weeks to complete
- Oh, it’s hard work. We just make it look easy.
Challenge:
Visitor: Knock, knock.
Logik: Who’s there?
Visitor: One of top 3 accounting firms in the world who’s desperately in need of eDiscovery assistance.
Logik: Uh, you’re joking, right?
Top 3 Firm: No, seriously, we really need your help.
Logik (opening the door wide with a grin): Well then, come on in and stay awhile.
That’s just about how things happened, only they used a phone. Our now very new client was in a serious eDiscovery jam. Their customer presented them with a mind-boggling and “need it now now now” eDiscovery request: process 250GBs of Lotus Notes .NSFs files, Microsoft Outlook .PSTs files and various MS Office documents (eDocs) from 50 custodians. Then search each of the 50 custodians with unique combinations of English and Spanish keywords, file type categories and date ranges. Next, tag any hit results with the category hit plus the keywords hit and load it all into kCura’s Relativity™ software, with a unique Bates number schema per custodian. One more thing… they need it all ready for review in three weeks.
Even for a multi-billion dollar accounting company with an excellent reputation for eDiscovery services, this was a project that needed special attention. They looked to Logik because they knew our capabilities and were comfortable with our team managing a very complex project. Ok, we said. No problem.
So, what’s the problem:
- Natively process 250GBs of NSFs, PSTs and eDocs
- Search the 50 custodians with unique combinations of English and Spanish keywords, file type categories and date ranges
- Tag any hit results with the category hit plus the keywords hit
- Assign a unique number to each of the 50 custodians documents responsive to the keywords and deliver to client for load into the Relativity document review software
- Load all the data and have it ready for review in three weeks
What we did:
The very first thing we did on this project was to convince our client that a universal Bates numbering schema for all 50 custodians would be 1,000 times more efficient than a unique number per custodian. Since the custodian information is captured in a database field, this wasn’t a big change request, but it was a change that saved our client from significant delays in deliveries.
A project this complex needs a level of attention that only a few people possess. Lucky for us, we are all a little OCD when it comes to eDiscovery. We created detailed spreadsheets to track every single custodian, the keywords/categories hit and missed, the total documents and pages each category yielded. And to make sure we did this right, we also developed a new search tagging software to super-charge the tagging process.
This new search software enabled us to perform the complicated searches for all 50 custodians simultaneously. This took less than 30 minutes over a population of 3,000,000 documents. Putting things into perspective, before this project started the same process would have taken us at least two days to complete. A few dozen or so search reports later, the results were finalized. We exported the results along with all the search metadata for delivery into Relativity in less than two days.
The results:
- 250GBs of NSFs, PSTs, and eDocs natively processed in less than 4 days
- Our enhanced search software enabled us to shave days off the searching process
- 3,000,000 documents were reduced to 900,000 documents in less than 4 days
- From knock on the door to delivery, the project was completed in less than 2 weeks
- The client had 1 week to spare in loading up the 900,000 documents for review
- We helped one of the biggest accounting firms on the planet look like eDiscovery rock-stars