Ascent eDiscovery Culls 96% of Collected Data

doeLEGAL is an IPRO Certified Platinum Service Provider and a leader in the delivery of cloud-based legal services to law firms and corporate legal departments around the world. In business for almost 50 years, doeLEGAL remains the only provider of electronic discovery, litigation management, and legal spend management hosting solutions and services to own and operate its SSAE 16 Type II Tier-3 data center in Wilmington, DE. By partnering with advanced technologies and keeping all data on-premises, clients know they can depend on doeLEGAL to defensibly manage their litigation process from early data assessment through production without issues.

The Challenge

A doeLEGAL client was facing a Federal Government request to produce documents related to a large acquisition. doeLEGAL’s Ascent eDiscovery team worked with the client and a third-party company to collect data for over 50 custodians at 4 different locations. These efforts resulted in a total collection of almost 2 TB of raw data. Over 11,000,000 documents needed eDiscovery culling to reduce the review burden to be processed and reviewed before the clients’ pressing production deadline.

The Solution

The Ascent eDiscovery team knew that in order to process and review 11,000,000 documents within the mandated amount of time, they needed to begin early data assessment immediately. The data was loaded into doeLEGAL’s preferred eDiscovery platform now known as IPRO ADD to begin the initial de-duping and culling processes. The de-duped and culled data was then sent for TIFFing before finally being pushed to a review platform for attorney review. Aside from the initial collection, all work was done and stored in the Ascent eDiscovery cloud.

The Results

Using the IPRO for early case assessment, the Ascent eDiscovery team was able to reduce the size of the initial collection from over 11,000,000 documents to under 500,000 to be reviewed, with a final cull rate of over 96%. The final produced collection was just 146,738 documents, which were TIFFed with IPRO’s ADD platform.

“The real challenge was the particularly large volume of data and the tight time deadline,” said John Hagan, Manager, EED Services at doeLEGAL. “However, once we were given the final search terms, the total time from initial ingestion to the first production was less than five weeks, thanks to the significant de-duping and eDiscovery culling rate we were able to achieve with IPRO.”

The team searched on different keywords and time frames within several different groups of custodians and was able to get all the collected data culled, processed, and reviewed before the production deadline, despite the fact that it was being collected on a rolling basis. “We received the last delivery of collected data two days before the first production.” John continued, “We were able to cull it, TIFF it, and push it into the review database. It was then reviewed and produced with the first production.”

To add complication to the already daunting request, the Federal Government had a unique request for a report that contained all documents that were duplicates of another document, even if the documents were not produced.

“It’s great that Allegro keeps track of all document duplicates in the collection. We were able to easily provide that report to the Federal Government with the final production.” John concluded.

Conclusion

By making the strategic decision to utilize the eDiscovery culling tool IPRO ADD in the litigation process, the Ascent eDiscovery team was able to significantly reduce the amount of documents that were sent to the costly and time-sensitive stage of attorney review. This approach resulted in an efficient production that enabled the client to meet their deadline and save thousands of dollars on attorney review costs. doeLEGAL continues to leverage advanced technology from IPRO to provide innovative, defensible, and cost-effective eDiscovery and litigation support services to its clients. Part of doeLEGAL’s ongoing commitment to training its experts allows them to use these tools to continue to help clients get the most out of their work.