The Challenge
The lawyers for a big defendant in a federal trade secrets case came to us with a problem: Their client used very broad search terms, which resulted in far too many documents being received for an affordable review.
The client was just one-third of the way through their rolling collection. Reviewing all of the potentially relevant documents (485,500 and growing with each new collection) wasn’t going to work within their client’s limited budget or their even more limited timeframe for the case.
The Solution
A typical straight Relativity-based review just wasn’t going to cut it. Even at breakneck speeds, the firm would have needed more than 7,500 hours for this first set of documents alone, and, again, many more documents were on their way into the system soon. Budgets would be blown, deadlines would be missed, and only bad things would happen. Because Envize™ is integrated directly into Relativity, we were able to put the power of Envize to work for them within hours.
Envize’s machine learning capabilities enabled the firm to have just one associate who knew the case well put in 17 hours to review a small set of documents: 150 for judgmental sampling and 950 active learning docs selected by Envize, providing 1,100 human decisions for training. Even within that incredibly short timeframe, Envize’s training stabilization gauge showed that it was ready to work its magic.In less than two more hours, barely 112 minutes, Envize checked through the remaining documents, over 484,000 of them to weed out the junk and find the roughly 24,000 which were potentially relevant. Another few hours for the dedicated case associate to review two statistical samples totaling 800 documents for QC confirmed Envize was right on point.
Revolutionize your Predictive Analytics Workflow:
Choose from multiple sampling methods
Train your team faster
Manage rolling population changes
Access superior performance measures
Generate top-quality progress estimates
View automated project analysis
Maintain total transparency and control over the entire process
The Results
That meant that the firm could defensibly discard more 450,000 documents as nonrelevant with the technological horsepower and proof needed to back those numbers up in court if needed. With one associate who spent just over 20 hours total reviewing documents, including QC, the firm was able to meet all initial deadlines with a defensible review that cost the client barely $8,000 in billable time when they were expecting to pay nearly $525,000 – a savings on the review time costs so far of more than $517,000! And that’s just on the first one-third of the document set.
As the rest of the documents come in, those already impressive savings will simply grow even greater as it leverages the work already done. Plus, the firm gets to keep the understanding of what is in the documents – and the review billable hours – all in house instead of watching it walk out the door when the contract document reviewers are done.
By integrating Envize™ into Relativity, the client saved $500K+.
