Reaping benefits from discovery tools

The Seattle-based law firm Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro (JMBM) recently chose some high-tech document analysis and visualization tools to expedite the review of nearly 50 million pages of documents for a lawsuit. The solution from

Attenex helped the firm find incriminating evidence, including a spreadsheet that became a focal point at trial.

The lawsuit involved more than 20 different claims and a large body of data, which had to be searched through and managed in four months. The law firm chose Attenex Patterns technology to quickly find the most relevant documents among the millions involved.

"[The solution] demonstrated immediate benefits within only a few weeks by significantly reducing the amount of reviewable material and isolating the key documents," says Dan Sedor, a partner at JMBM. "It enabled us to quickly gain a visual understanding of the entire review corpus, displaying how the documents relate to each other, as well as offering the ability to both find and browse the same documents using a key concept. Using the software, we uncovered electronic evidence in time to use it in numerous depositions, summary judgment motions, trial preparations and trial."

In preparation for the discovery process, for example, JMBM assembled a team of associates, summer associates and paraprofessionals. The team used seven workstations networked on a secure server loaded with the software to review data in 1,000 document batches from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., six days a week. Taking less than four months, the team sifted through almost 50 million pages of electronic records, locating essential documents, like the key spreadsheet, that led to a huge verdict for their client.

Says Sedor, "The costs of the electronic review, including attorney review time and hardware and software costs, were significantly less than using a more traditional approach, and yielded very important evidence in the case, ultimately resulting in a tremendous half-billion dollar verdict for our client."