Improving Review Efficiencies
by Richard Wersinger, Technical Trainer, Fios, Inc.
In their August 2009 Law Technology News article, Robbery?: Are we cheating clients if we don’t purge duplicates? (Law Technology News, August 2009, Vol 16 No. 8, ) authors Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie suggest it is possible to gain review efficiencies by deduping across multiple custodians. They wrote:
While many techniques (e-mail threading, concept clustering, analytics) can improve review efficiencies, we focused on deduping across custodians, because it is readily available and can be implemented in most review programs. It is the low-hanging fruit of litigation cost control.
A single example: If Bob sends an e-mail to three people, there are four total copies of that e-mail. When Bob backs up his copy, there are then five copies. Deduping only within individual custodians reduces Bob’s two copies to one but there are still four copies to review, one for each custodian — what we would term quadruple billing. Deduping all custodians would result in just one file to review, a 75% reduction compared to single-custodian deduping.
However, if your request to produce precludes deduping across custodians, review platforms like Fios Prevail can offer a path to realizing improved review efficiencies with a powerful feature, “Apply Categories to Duplicates.”
In Fios Prevail, when a category is applied (tagged or foldered) to a document with exact context duplicates in other custodians, and the feature “Apply Categories to Duplicates” is enabled, all exact context duplicates of that document are categorized at the same time. The result is a need to review only the one document, rather than all the other exact context duplicates in the document collection.
In this example. The word processing files, Custodian Alpha’s document 63 and Custodian Bravo’s document 199 are identified as exact context duplicates by Fios Prevail. Reviewing and categorizing Custodian Alpha’s document 63 as “Responsive” applies that same category to Custodian Bravo’s document 199 as well as all the other exact context duplicates document 63 throughout the document collection. Only one document, Custodian Alpha’s document 63, was reviewed by the team.
To learn more about how to apply categories in Fios Prevail, try one of the following tutorials:
- Applying Categories to Duplicates; Applying Categories to Email Chains
- Using the Chain Explorer: Reviewing and Categorizing Items in Email Chains
- Using the Duplicate Explorer: Reviewing and Categorizing Duplicate Items
Filed under Discerning e-Discovery.