Global Leader Completes Internal Investigation Involving 20-25 Custodians within Days
Review 95,000 e-mail documents within ten days to determine whether there was verifiable employee misconduct to support disciplinary action.
Enable a team of eight contract reviewers to process and de-duplicate 200,000 records and evaluate and mark the remaining documents for responsiveness, all the while providing the client with real-time access to the entire project.
Within five days, the contract review team found 250 responsive documents from a data set originally 800 times larger. The project was completed in half the time with an average review rate of 450 documents per hour at the end of the review.
The Challenge
A Fortune 1000 company with a global brand learned of potential employee misconduct and initiated an internal investigation. It identified 20-25 suspected custodians and immediately collected their e-mail (including any attachments) from a specified time period for review and analysis.
The purpose of the review was to determine whether the evidence supported allegations of wrongdoing, and to develop a strategy on which to proceed. Time was of the essence as certain employees were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome.
What was of paramount concern was trustworthiness and responsiveness. The company wanted the project completed within ten days and its legal department was looking for links to specific websites in e-mail messages as well as attached photographs or other graphic files. Risk of public disclosure loomed over the project and the company remained sensitive to the security of its data.
The Solution
After sending DTI the 95,000 records at issue, the company simultaneously engaged its preferred staffing agency to hire contract reviewers for this short-term assignment. On Monday DTI began processing the data with Attenex Patterns. The data was then divided into 53 batches of 2000-2,500 documents each. It then assigned certain sets of batches to designated reviewers on Wednesday morning. By that afternoon, contract personnel were evaluating whether the material under scrutiny was relevant or not and separating them accordingly. Given the nature of the matter, privilege was not a concern.
The company’s in-house e-discovery team seamlessly archived the files and sent individually marked DVDs to Document Technologies, Inc. for production. DTI asked the eight document reviewers to work six to eight-hour days until completion. Upon receipt of the 200,000 original files, DTI loaded them into the Attenex® Patterns® Workbench™ module and used its patented technology to de-duplicate 105,000 records by uniformly suppressing exact and near duplicates.
Review attorneys organized their analysis by employee following 1½ hours of training in the substance of the legal matter and one hour of software instruction. “It was pretty impressive that we could train document reviewers to use a tool for the first time in the morning and by that afternoon they were proficient,” says DTI’s Jennifer Beilstein, the Director of Hosting and Client Services in its National Technology Center.
In fact, contract personnel were reviewing 250-300 documents per hour by the next day, which was Thursday. By Friday, they were averaging 450 marks per hour. The performance was noteworthy because the market in which the review took place is not a hotbed for this type of work. As such, there were contractors who were completely unfamiliar with litigation specific tools.
“The software is so easy that they were able to follow a workflow and pick up the tool very quickly,” adds Beilstein.
The Results
In the end, the client was pleased. Ultimately, “the visualization of Attenex helped to increase review speed,” remarks Beilstein. “If there was no visualization, it would have been a lot slower.”
Using Attenex Patterns, however, they finished the project in only five days. With the concept analysis tools available through Document Mapper, reviewers were able to evaluate the material in clusters and quickly gauge relevancy. Of the 95,000 documents submitted, 250 were responsive. “It allowed our client and its staffing agency to take ownership, which made the review move smoothly,” says Beilstein. “To manage costs, corporations are trying to take back some of the control,” she adds.
While this was an important project for the client, it was one in which it did not need to utilize outside counsel at this stage. It collected the necessary material and enlisted the support of DTI to provide further review capability.
DTI controlled the review using the back end tools built into Attenex Patterns Workbench. When reporting to the client, DTI exported an index of the relevant documents so that in-house counsel could review the most critical records. It also provided TIFF-formatted images of each document on the index. Counsel reviewed those documents and followed-up with questions. Importantly, the lawyers did not want results in native format to avoid opening inappropriate e-mail attachments or photos to open on their computers.
In sum, Beilstein describes the project as “short, sweet and fast.” She might add efficient and cost-effective.