Top DC Antitrust Group Prevails with E-mail Thread Technology

Ignited Discovery eliminates irrelevant documents through innovative approaches to assist their clients in the achievement of rapid discovery and review.

Problem

A prominent Washington, D.C. law firm’s Antitrust group was faced with less than one month to process and review hundreds of thousands of documents. Provided with a limited time frame, it was imperative that the attorneys be able to quickly focus their attention on the relevant documents and avoid all redundant data. In response, the client sought assistance from Ignited Discovery, in recognition of its vast array of creative, proprietary solutions in electronic discovery.

Solution

Upon receiving the task, the project team at Ignited first conducted a series of brief, yet thorough, discussions with counsel members and support staff to understand their objectives and the necessary time constraints for each stage of discovery. The challenge was to collect, process, review, and produce the entirety of the data in less than one month. The solution would need to allow the legal team adequate time to review each and every relevant document before producing to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Following these discussions, Ignited quickly applied global de-duplication, date restrictions, and sophisticated search queries, and then eliminated all non-inclusive e-mail conversations per client request. Each of these steps proved to be effective; however, e-mail threading yielded the largest reduction of all (see figures below).

Filtering Method	Records Before	Records After	Reduction	Total Reduction
Global Deduplication	359,712	254,603	29.2%	29.2%
Date Restrictions	254,603	207,443	18.5%	42.3%
Search Terms	207,443	186,940	9.8%	48.0%
E-mail Thread Identification	186,940	128,435	31.2%	64.3%

Figure 1.1 – Filtering methods and their impact on the document collection.

Through the utilization of Equivio’s ‘E-mail Tree’ technology, Ignited was able to identify all inclusive e-mail threads (based on content comparison) and deliver this information to the client for review, thereby reducing the data set by an additional 31.2%. This practice not only avoided countless hours of costly review, but also enhanced the effectiveness of the staff attorneys by ensuring that they never read the same e-mail conversation twice.

Value

By applying its creative, cutting edge solutions at a time when every day was critical, Ignited Discovery has been retained by its client as a choice vendor for their electronic discovery requirements.

For more information on E-mail Thread Identification, please visit the Creative Solutions section of our website.