CASE STUDY

A law firm has been made aware that its corporate client is reasonably anticipating pending litigation, precipitating the need for the firm to conduct an early case assessment to determine the risks and benefits of potentially taking the case to trial.  While initiating an early case assessment, the firm wants to make better and faster decisions on legal strategy and tactics based on real-time information about the material in their client's enterprise system.

The firm understands that a successful early case assessment, and possibly resolution, is contingent upon conducting a more informed and expedited analysis at the outset of the dispute.  The legal team's objective is to understand the dimensions of risk very quickly, without waiting for collection to occur.  To realize this goal, the law firm seeks a solution that will enable it to save the client and the firm unnecessary costs.

THE eDI SOLUTION

To assist the law firm in gaining a quicker understanding of the case, eDI's Early Case Assessment process enables attorney-driven decisions to automatically prioritize the client's data.  Using statistical and self-learning techniques to prioritize documents by relevance, the lawyers rapidly assess the key issues and concepts.

In addition to the automatic prioritization of data, eDI's Keyword Relevancy process creates a high-relevance keyword list, based on expert analysis of a sample set of documents, which is used for further targeting relevant documents.

eDI's Early Case Assessment satisfies the firm's desire to analyze its client's data before it is collected, by allowing the legal team to:

• Identify the custodians relevant to the case.
• Perform concept-based data analysis to present key concepts over time. Within minutes, the firm's users can view their data graphically, clearly illustrating who knew what and when.
• Identify the subjects and date ranges that will target a highly responsive set.
• Identify the key terms that will return a highly responsive data set, which can potentially eliminate as much as 80% of the non-responsive "false" keyword hits.
• Improve case strategy by analyzing key terms prior to Meet-and-Confer conferences.

CASE RESULT

By providing the law firm with a broad view of the entire data corpus, the collection stage is prioritized based on particular custodians, themes or concepts, enabling the firm's legal team to quickly formulate their litigation strategies.