Situation

Our client is a law firm engaged in construction arbitration. A large proportion of potentially relevant data was contained within an INCITE project collaboration and information management platform. This platform was used to record all communication between parties during the construction project. However, it is a difficult platform to search and retrieve the documents that may be relevant for this arbitration. The client was eager to use a platform like Relativity to take advantage of the robust searching and tagging functionality.

In this matter, there were over 2.5 million transmittal communications as well as attachments within the INCITE platform. However, duplicate versions of these attachments were also stored within INCITE. The same set of documents was attached to each transmission in a chain of communicative transmissions. To complicate the dataset further, there were instances where attachments were added and removed from transmittal communications. This meant it was uncertain whether the last transmittal communication in the chain contained all associated attachments. A standard deduplication process could not solve this duplicative data problem, and a unique solution was required to ensure that the INCITE database was maintained in full while at the same time minimising the duplicative attachment issue from both a hosting cost perspective and a legal review cost perspective.

Solution

Our solutions and technical team performed standard eDiscovery processing on the INCITE data set. We also used previously deployed customised de-duplication and threading techniques to reduce the initial INCITE data set by removing duplicative transmittal families. This reduced data set was hosted in Sky Discovery’s low-cost Early Case Assessment (“ECA”) database. This database primarily served to maintain the integrity of the evidence across the Incite data set and ensure that we maintain best practices when it comes to data management and chain of custody.

The legal team performed a high-level review and search of the INCITE data in the Relativity ECA database and selected specific folders of interest for review. Sky Discovery identified the last transmittal communication and associated attachments from selected folders and promoted one version to a Relativity Review database. This allowed the legal team to undertake the substantive review on a smaller set of transmittal communications. If there was a need to interrogate specific transmittal chains in their entirety, everything was preserved, searchable and identifiable in the ECA database.

Impact

This workflow solution allowed our client to:

• Maintain the original INCITE data set from an evidence-preservation perspective but in a lower-cost environment.

• Substantively reduce the number of transmittal communications that needed to be reviewed and

• Reduce the time and fees associated with hosting and reviewing the duplicative attachments linked to the transmittal communications.

We focus on technical solutions so you can focus on the law. Contact us via solutions@skydiscovery.com.au to find out how we can help.