Solutions

QUiVX understands the unique demands and processes legal professionals require during litigation.

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Analytics

Many electronic files also have associated data called “metadata”. For example, an image file may have metadata that includes when the picture was taken, where the picture was taken, the camera model, etc. Document metadata may include properties such as when the document was created, last modified, the author’s name, the time spent editing etc.

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    Email threading

    The email chain is typically a great time-saver because the system will show you the most inclusive email (typically the most recent email) which includes the entire conversation. Viewing one document versus 8 or 9 in the chain is such a huge time-savings for the reviewer. In addition, items of the chain may not appear consecutively because data is typically processed in date/time order. So, if emails were sent between the time of the reply, the chain is not broken.

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    Near duplicate grouping

    As you know in litigation there are many documents that resemble each other,however there are slight differences in the document. From a review standpoint, these documents are typically all the same in terms of issue, responsiveness, or privilege. Therefore, grouping these “near duplicate” documents together, allows the reviewer to make coding decisions in the matter of seconds because their eyes are used to seeing the same type of document.

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    Concept clustering

    Analytics will use clustering to group together documents sharing the same concept. This is helpful when working with a dataset that the reviewer has very little knowledge of.

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    TAR – Technology Assisted Review

    When the review is on a time crunch, there are options for technology to help speed-up your review. The system learns your coding decisions based on the documents you are reviewing. Once the system has a good idea of your coding decisions, a group of documents will be sent out to the reviewers. The system will test the coding decisions made by the system, against the actual reviewers coding decisions, and provide you with a score. This process will repeat itself until the score is equal to that of a human reviewer. This is a great technique that helps conquer the massive data loads. This review method is accepted by the courts based on this case. www.giveanexample.com

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Review

The document review process (also known as doc review) of your case is generally the most time consuming and costly part of the suit. This is where each party to the case sorts through and analyzes the documents and the data they possess to determine which are sensitive or otherwise relevant to the case.

These documents are reviewed by the attorneys and typically obtained through the discovery process which is generally governed by the rules of procedure for the presiding court. In 2006, the rules in the United States Federal Courts were updated to include electronically stored information. This is known as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (F.R.C.P.) 16, 26, 33, 34, 37, and 45.

As these documents are reviewed, they must be tagged according to certain categories, including whether it is relevant to an issue in the case, whether it is responsive to a discovery request, whether it is confidential, or whether it is attorney-client or otherwise privileged. Once the review or part of the review is complete, the responsive/relevant documents are presented to the opposing party for review.

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Trial Services

Trial Services or Trial support involves receiving help with the digital presentation of your case during trial. A trial technician meets with the attorney to go over the relevant documents that will come up during the trial. This includes exhibits and demonstrative boards which the jury will see. The technician is responsible for installing and calibrating the hardware, computers, monitors and visual equipment for presentation to the jury.

The technician and the attorney work hand-in-hand to ensure the documents the attorney refers to, are up and visible for the jury and the judge to see without breaking the flow of the attorney’s presentation. This also allows real-time magnification and highlighting of key information on the exhibit so that this information stands out for everyone to see.

The technician can also work closely with your trial team to create compelling visuals and trial presentations to enhance any case.

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Hosting

Document hosting comes into play when a firm or company has large amounts of data to review. The term “hosting” in this case translates to the company who is managing the actual reviewable data. The hosting company usually has a tool, or website which allows the end-user(s) to review the electronic data involved in the lawsuit. These review tools give the reviewer one location to review, organize, and code the documents.

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    Current methods of review – With a record amount of data, today’s data is getting generated digitally (email, MS Office, text). This quickly adds up to ten’s-of-thousands, to millions of pages depending on the number of custodians. Hosting companies have review tools to help you conquer and review this data.

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    Purchasing and maintaining the IT staff for these review platforms can be quite expensive, so the thought of a firm purchasing this high-ticket item is unappealing. That’s where the hosting vendor comes in. The vendor purchases the review platform and handles all the hardware associated with running the software, they handle the IT, they handle the maintenance and backup of the data. Since the vendor handles multiple cases, and multiple clients, the low-end cost to the client is appealing.

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    Due to the dominance of electronically stored information and the increasing use of machine learning, technology assisted review is becoming quite popular for larger reviews.

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Project Consulting

The collection and review of electronically stored information for your case starts early in the process. The mapping of potential relevant information involved in the case and the way this data is collected for your review team is important to think about early on.

The data collection can be handled in several ways. The client can save their own data, however the methods for saving this data needs to match the court requirements. For example, an end-user saving their emails to their desktop and handing it to the attorneys is probably not the best way to collect the data due to the fact that there may be a lot of data that no longer resides on the end-user’s computer.

Many companies have email servers. These servers collect all emails coming into the organization, and sparse out to the individual end-users. Even though the emails can be deleted from the end-user’s computer, the email should still exist on the email server. Therefore, it is good practice to capture the data from both the email server and the individual end-user’s computer, also known as the custodian. The emails exported from Outlook email will be in the form of a PST (Personal Storage Table). The PST is a container file that contains messages, calendar items, and memo’s created on Microsoft Outlook. Emails from a Mac computer are in MBOX format.

Do the end users of these companies know the type of data that can be collected from their machines, laptops, and company phones? Many times, these employees delete information with no knowledge that this data is actually recoverable. For instance, in cases where employees have stolen company information and saved this information onto an external drive, the computer notes exactly when the external drive was plugged in. The data itself is not tracked, but the time and date the device was plugged in is captured.

Addressing and understanding these items will allow a smooth process for your team to avoid future sanctions by understanding how to handle preservation letters and litigation holds.

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Digital Forensics

With so much of today’s information stored digitally and across multiple devices the act of “correctly” capturing this information is imperative. Digital forensics is just that. Skilled technical staff captures preserved data in a forensic manner ensuring not only the completeness of the data but that the underlying “metadata” is also successfully preserved and captured. Forensic data is collected in a digital container file that cannot be read or altered without special software. This allows us, in some cases to retrieve hidden or deleted data but more importantly ensures key metadata such as “Date Created”, “Date Modified”, “Author” and more is preserved allowing for a high degree of data manipulation. Forensically collected data is also defensible in court. With the inclusion of metadata, granular and targeted review becomes far easier and review time on non-responsive data is kept to a minimum.

Not sure how to handle a project?

We’ll be happy to discuss your options and offer recommendations. QUiVX offers consulting and training at no additional cost on various database management tools to streamline the review process.

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