Early Case Assessment: The Benefit Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Transcription

1 Early Case Assessment: The Benefit Is in the Eye of the Beholder Scott M. Cohen Director, E-Discovery Support Services Winston & Strawn LLP Tom Morrisey Sr. Director, IT Litigation Purdue Pharma LP Chuck Kellner E-Discovery Strategist Greg Buckles Consultant Reason-eD LLC ediscoveryjournal Duane Lites (Moderator) Director, Litigation Support Jackson Walker LLP

2 What is early case assessment? Depending on how you look at it, ECA can mean several things.

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4 How Do You Define ECA? Law Firm Corporate Vendor Consultant

5 How Do You Define ECA? Law Firm Initial consideration of the facts of the case, its legal merits, possible defensive/offensive strategies and its potential for business interruption. Analysis and evaluation of the electronically stored information collected (or to be collected) during the discovery phase of litigation

6 How Do You Define ECA? Corporate Risk Assessment Value to the Company Reduction in scope

7 How Do You Define ECA? Consultant Identification as a business process Workflow-Defined, documented and tested Technology to search and analyze in the wild Letting the ESI speak for itself

8 How Do You Define ECA? Service Provider A process by which a client and its legal team can: Evaluate potential risks of litigation based upon identifiable key facts Evaluate cost of discovery and other cost factors of the litigation Utilize metrics to help minimize litigation size, cost and risk.

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10 ECA - Corporate Goal / Objective Risk Assessment Identify value of case from a business perspective Bet the Business

11 ECA - Corporate Tools / Methods Know your business (or that of your client) Historical data can provide insight Define/Contain Scope Assess costs of case

12 ECA Corporate Benefits Reduce scope and thereby reduce spend

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14 ECA - Consultant Goal / Objective Effective Legal Holds on Archive Tools / Methods Targeted searches Frequency reports Sampling Criteria tests

15 ECA - Consultant Benefits Hold potential relevant (15%) vs. All custodial (100%) Minimize business/it impact

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17 Goals for ECA Service Provider Client s s Goals & Strategy Identify Key Facts Costs, Metrics & Reports Defensible Search Methodology

18 ECA Vendor Tools and Methods Client & IT Interview Skills Iterative & Documented Search Connectors DeNISTing Processing Text Extraction Indexing Formatting Forensic Transparency Tightly Integrated Workflow

19 ECA Service Provider Benefits Legal team uses several tools and skills to execute this process including: Interview skills Information management and database tools Analytical tools, including cost and search analysis Negotiation skills

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21 ECA Law Firm Goal / Objective Given an enormous amount of corporate server data, leverage ECA software tools and methodologies to defensibly identify potentially relevant, non-privileged ESI while eliminating non-relevant material in support of regulatory investigation.

22 ECA Law Firm Tools / Methods ECA product used to perform: Key term/phrase analysis analysis (domain, conversations, date distribution) Custodian analysis De-nisting File-type filtering

23 ECA Law Firm Benefits Over 90 % reduction in review volume resulting in substantial time and cost savings Fast identification of potentially privileged documents Identification of additional custodians based upon initial searches

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25 Questions

26 Early Case Assessment: The Benefit Is in the Eye of the Beholder Scott M. Cohen Director, E-Discovery Support Services Winston & Strawn LLP Tom Morrisey Sr. Director, IT Litigation Purdue Pharma LP Chuck Kellner E-Discovery Strategist Greg Buckles Consultant Reason-eD LLC ediscoveryjournal Duane Lites (Moderator) Director, Litigation Support Jackson Walker LLP