Immediate Case Assessment Significantly Reduces Document Volume and Increases Review Efficiency

Consilio was engaged by a Banking Client to manage e-discovery and document review on an internal investigation of alleged trading misconduct. Consilio’s Analytics Team conducted an Immediate Case Assessment (“ICA”) exercise, which included the: (a) skillful modification of search terms and evaluation of the results to exclude non-relevant documents; (b) intelligent application of email threading to eliminate duplicative content; and (d) limitation of first-pass review to search term hits with high recall. Combining technology and expertise in this way resulted in the significant reduction of the number of documents to be reviewed, allowing the investigation to focus on a targeted volume of rich content.

The Analytics Team scrutinized search term hits and quickly identified several email senders of mass email alerts. Focusing on the top unique email addresses by volume and leveraging clustering technology, Consilio grouped emails according to their conceptual similarity. By then leveraging cluster visualization (using Brainspace’s cluster wheel), Consilio confirmed definitively those emails that were not relevant to the investigation and removed them from needless first-pass review. The Team also evaluated search terms that were yielding large volumes for review. Focused clustering of unique hits, and visual analysis of content, allowed Consilio to determine that several terms were capturing boilerplate language. For instance, the term “risk” hit on industry reports containing the phrase, “accessing such sites is at your own risk.” Refining the term as “risk NOT W/0 accessing such sites is at your own risk,” Consilio drastically reduced a high volume of non-relevant returns by the search. By proposing a series of similar search term modifications, Consilio reduced considerably the number of documents for review.

Not relevant documents excluded from review saving 53% of the overall review cost.

Overall reduction after ICA Review was a saving of 69% of what the overall costs would have been.