Lineal | Case Studies | Litigation Support Solutions

International Law Firm Rescued Energy Co. Contract Dispute Resolution Global Financial Services Predictive Coding

Client:

An international law firm with offices in London

Our client was acting for a high net worth individual who had invested a multi-million pound sum in a start-up business that subsequently went into liquidation amidst allegations of embezzlement and fraud by the founders.

The end-client had initially retained a Big-4 firm to collect the data but the electronic and paper format documents were delivered in an extremely disorganised and unusable format.

Our client indicated that they needed “to be immediately rescued.”

Task

Lineal was instructed to replace the previous vendor and provide a database of documents that could be simply accessed and reviewed.

Challenges

Over 150,000 pages of hardcopy documents required scanning, OCR, unitisation and coding, with 12 fields to provide suitable reference detail for the eventual disclosure process; ESI comprised a mixture

of emailsand previously scanned documents (requiring separate unitisation and coding); data protection concerns and immediate turnaround required working 24-hours per day, non-stop, for four consecutive days.

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Overview

Lineal’s Project Management Team created a file structure according to Firm’s request, identifying key attributes from context and metadata. Our team was able to present the data in a categorised and comprehensible

format, capable of being indexed and accurately searched.

Once successfully restructured the data was processed directly within the Relativity review platform, native files and metadata were extracted, and the interface was customised to include specific workflow, coding decisions and issue tags requested by the case management team.

Our Project Managers assisted with complex keyword search strings, batched documents for review, and provided daily progress reports to ensure that the review would be completed in advance of the disclosure deadline.

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Outcome

Facing a seemingly insurmountable task, Lineal structured a large and disorganised data collection, included newly converted ESI from a large and disorganised paper archive, provided a review platform, and ensured that key

milestones and deadlines were met. As a result, our client was able to focus on the legal matters involved in the case and not on delays and distractions caused by a previous vendor’s errors.

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Client:

A global law firm

Our client is acting for a multi-national service provider to the energy industry. The dispute is multi-jurisdictional and involves collating data from differing jurisdictions and liaising with the jointly instructed law firms across differing time zones.

Task

Lineal was instructed to act as the primary data host, to provide a review platform, and deliver project management services across multiple jurisdictions. Providing various access levels

to respect the different applications of confidentiality, privilege, and export restrictions over data was of critical importance; the end client was keen to reduce the billable hours associated with the eDiscovery & Disclosure process.

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Challenges

There were multiple custodians identified as being potentially relevant to the matter located in five different countries; some of these custodians no longer worked for the claimant and/or

defendant, so collecting their data was problematic; the client wanted first to evaluate 10 key custodians’ data, which exceeded 600GB, in order to quickly establish the key facts of the case.

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Overview

Using the Relativity Processing Console, Lineal’s Project Management Team pre-processed the key custodians’ 600GB, which exploded to 1.2TB of unstructured data (two million documents) after decompression

. We immediately de-duplicated this data, parsed the email sender domains known to be irrelevant, and filtered it by file type, custodian and date range. Using Relativity’s Analytics Module, Lineal enabled the firm to conduct Early Case Assessment (ECA). We performed advanced keyword searching using categorisation and term co-occurrence indexing, and were able to cull the data set to by over 80% to 230GB (400,000 documents). Lineal then used email threading to reduce the email volume by a further 20% to 320,000 documents, which our client then began to review.

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Outcome

Through a rigorous, iterative data culling process combined with our data analytics expertise, Lineal was able to reduce the number of review hours from 33,000 to 6,700, achieving significant savings

in legal fees over a three month period. By immediately availing only the most relevant information to our client, we were able to help reduce the number of additional data collections from the other custodians.

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Client:

A global financial services firm and their outside counsel (an international law firm)

The matter involved a dispute that featured a large number of documents and emails with broken chains and threads.

The client had a very short window in which to prepare for disclosure, was keen to reduce eDisclosure & Discovery costs, as well as billable time spent on physical review.

The relevant data was stored in a Symantec Enterprise Vault system and we were asked to use the Symantec eDiscovery Platform to manage the review.

Task

Lineal was asked to provide technical consulting services pertaining to data culling and assisted review/transparent predictive coding workflow, and ultimately to manage the e-Disclosure & Discovery process.

Challenges

A very short lead time (four weeks) in which to prepare for disclosure; a targeted digital forensic collection comprising over 640,000 potentially relevant documents from four custodians.

Overview

Lineal’s Project Management Team made a careful study of the key issues involved in the case. Working with general and outside counsel, we developed complex keyword strings, enabled by the analytics capabilities of the Symantec eDiscovery Platform

, in addition to de-NISTing the data, deduplication, and applying date range and file type filters, to cull the data by 92% to 12GB (just over 50,000 documents).

It would have taken their five paralegals/associates over six weeks to complete the review. We needed to reduce this by half in order achieve the deadline. Lineal suggested using Transparent Predictive Coding (TPC) to further cull the data and reveal the most statistically and contextually relevant documents for review.

TPC enables review teams to achieve highly accurate results and reduce risk during eDiscovery and review. Complete visibility into the prediction process enables users to make informed decisions with confidence in the defensibility of results. TPC combines technology and lawyer review through an iterative process to apply a relevance score to every document. Over a course of three days, outside counsel performed a first pass review of 1,600 statistically valid documents to “train” the system and create an algorithm that recognized and accurately coded the remaining documents, stack ranking them in order of statistical relevance and contextual similarity. The TPC process returned 18,000 documents (a further 65% reduction).

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Outcome

By integrating artificial intelligence within the review workflow, TPC led to a smaller, targeted data set for review.

Lineal eliminated 32,000 documents from the clients’ review process. This equated to a savings of four weeks for five full time reviewers and a total of over £130,000 in billable hours.

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* Much of our litigation support work is confidential and therefore we are unable to publish all of our case studies. Should you wish to find out more about the projects we work on and our clients please call us on +44 (0) 207 940 4799 or email us.