How breakthrough search technology is changing the game in E-Discovery
by Ramon Nunez

E-mail is now the #1 source of evidence in corporate legal matters. As a result, the E-Discovery market is growing by 60 per cent annually – now the most costly component of the legal and investigatory process. And as complexity increases, the associated costs and risks continue to soar.

Companies that are unable to quickly analyze their electronic documents are extremely vulnerable – without sufficient understanding of their legal position, corporate counsel is paralyzed, or worse, misled. The current approach to E-Discovery offers little relief – it is a process dominated by a parade of outsourced service providers, and it relies largely on manual approaches and methods that are error prone, time consuming and simply not scalable to address the exponential growth in content being created and stored electronically.

Without analysis technology, a legal team must start its review process from scratch, with no real idea what may be unearthed. This means that all of a case’s e-mail messages and documents (numbering in the hundreds of thousands for large organizations) must be reviewed and coded one-by-one, in no discernable order. As a result, many of the messages and documents may appear nonsensical and irrelevant to the hired reviewers.

Armed with little knowledge, the reviewer struggles to identify documents that may be of importance. Those documents that are flagged are routed to the legal team, which then attempts to make sense of the poorly filtered stack of potential evidence.

If unexpected evidence is unearthed midway through a case, chaos may ensue. Changing the direction of a traditional E-Discovery investigation can mean having to completely start over, re-reviewing e-mails under completely new criteria.

Analysis technology not only makes it possible to find vital information at the earliest stages of an investigation – which can help shape an accurate case strategy – it also makes it possible to change direction quickly, without unnecessary disruption or additional costs.

The ability to assess cases at their earliest stages can reduce overall E-Discovery costs by as much as 75 per cent, and can reduce the typical document review load by as much as 80 per cent – significant considering that analysts forecast E-Discovery software and services to be a $7 billion market by 2007.

When attorneys and their support staff can use software to begin assessing data early in their handling of the case, they can do a better job of prioritizing and triaging the data. Early case assessment technology enables corporate counsel or law firms to quickly find and drill down on the most relevant case material during the early stages of a case, often within hours of processing content. This gives them the opportunity to focus efforts on the data that is likely to mean the most to the case at hand.

At the same time, an effective early assessment could lead counsel to the conclusion that as much as 80 per cent of the data they processed is irrelevant and doesn’t need anything more than a cursory examination. Such early insight can inform initial strategic decision-making and drive more favorable case outcomes.

The legal community is slowly awakening to the harsh reality that the current E-Discovery process is slow, overly complicated, costly, error prone, and fraught with risk. Ultimately, adopting analysis technology is the only way corporate counsel and law firms can streamline the now overwhelming process while improving efficiency and maintaining more control over their own information.

Ramon Nunez, CEO, MetaLINCS

This article was published in the August 2007 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2007, all rights reserved.