Achieving Focused Review with Advanced Analytics
Document review in the litigation life cycle is all about speed, accuracy and cost-savings. In the traditional linear approach, documents are reviewed without regard for conceptual relevance; however, this can be a costly and slow process of sifting through thousands or even millions of potentially irrelevant documents to locate the much smaller relevant and privileged subsets requiring closer attention. The inherent inefficiencies lead to lost time and dollars, as well as the risk of inaccurate interpretation and inconsistent tagging of documents.
In response to these pressures, we integrated an advanced suite of conceptual analytics technologies (developed by Content Analyst Company) into our review platform to support a more focused review of documents. By allowing the analytics engine to do the “heavy lifting” of examining the documents’ content and organizing them based on conceptuality, our clients could redirect their time and energy to locating the truly responsive and relevant documents. The real question became: How could we convince professionals who are more familiar and comfortable with linear review to embrace analytics-driven focused review?
We started where most people might—by explaining to our clients how the technology creates the efficiencies we were promoting. Reviewing conceptually similar documents contiguously is the essence of focused review. Because the reviewer’s attention does not have to switch back and forth between vastly differing themes, topics and concepts, he or she can stay more mentally focused and make document decisions more quickly and accurately. Focused review even allows the reviewer to make a single decision for many documents, because the analytics software indicates strong conceptual overlap among the documents. If documents are strongly similar in content, then the same tag can be applied to all of them. This is where review-speeds and accuracy accelerate dramatically. In linear review, it would take a team of reviewers an enormous amount of time simply to organize the documents conceptually, but in an analytics-enhanced review, the software does it in a very small fraction of the time, with little or no human intervention required.
We integrated this powerful, advanced analytics technology into Inspicio, our custom-developed review platform, to enhance the unique features and capabilities that the software already provided. By creating a single-click method that review managers could use to assign conceptually similar documents to individual document reviewers, and providing a means by which review managers could track review progress in real time, we further encouraged focused review. Additionally, the combination of conceptuality and workflow management allowed review managers to deliberately push batches of related documents to reviewers whose expertise was best suited to the content. It’s easy to explain the efficiencies gained with that approach—get the right documents in front of the right reviewer.
Explaining is one thing, but nothing makes a stronger impact than showing the desired results playing out in a real client’s project. In one case, a client had 755,000 documents to review in three weeks. During the first week of the review, the client did not use analytics to organize the document assignments. For that period, the average review rate was 72 documents per hour. At this rate, the completely linear review would have taken 10,486 total hours, distributed across the entire review team. Cost for the review would have been $429,926, not including project and review management expenses.
With a short deadline and a complex set of tagging and coding requirements, we recommended that the client shift to focused review after the first week of the project. The average review rate for the remaining two weeks nearly doubled, to 113 documents per hour, and on several of those days toward the end of the project, the average rate topped 120 documents per hour. As people adjust to focused review, a consistent rate of well over 100 documents per hour is realistic.
Had the client used focused review for the entire project, the time required to review the entire population would have been 6,681 hours, distributed across the review team. The cost would have been slightly more than half of the cost of a traditional linear review, at $273,938.
Importantly, the review platform provided complete logging and auditing of all document decisions, supporting a defensible review methodology. Robust reporting allowed the client to observe performance increases as the project progressed, and to perform a detailed analysis of outcomes at the conclusion of the project. Having experienced the difference between traditional linear review and analytics-driven focused review—in terms of both time and cost—the client gained a new-found appreciation for the benefits that analytics could provide, and requested focused review methodology for future cases.
The review platform described in this article is Inspicio. Engineered by the research and development team at Altep, Inspicio is a powerful, scalable and flexible document management and review platform that combines traditional review tools with exciting new features and capabilities. Workflow management via To Do lists, robust reporting and an elegant integration of conceptual analytics technology driven by Content Analyst’s CAAT engine have afforded Altep’s clients significant time- and cost-savings in data-intensive cases nationwide.
Altep, Inc. is a leader and innovator in the fields of professional document management, electronic discovery and litigation support. We entered the litigation support market in 1994, and our services have evolved to encompass consulting, imaging, domestic coding, large-scale electronic data, paper and magnetic media discovery, Web repository hosting, computer forensics and complex data conversion. Additionally, through our strategic partnership with SuperiorReview, we are able to provide managed review services to assist organizations with projects of all sizes. To learn more about Inspicio or any of Altep’s other discovery processing and management services, visit www.altep.com, or e-mail info@altep.com.
Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Content Analyst is a leader of advanced search tools and technology. Content Analyst’s software, which includes patented Latent Semantic Indexing technology, provides concept-based search and advanced document analysis for a wide range of customers, from highly classified intelligence installations to world-class e-discovery providers. To learn more, visit www.contentanalyst.com, or email info@contentanalyst.com.