Am Law 100 Firm
United States
An AmLaw 100 law firm with 500 attorneys and a total staff of 1,000 improves workflow and saves money using C2C’s Advanced Discovery
A prominent US based law firm realized a significant amount of its discovery budget was routinely spent on processing unnecessary data. Seeking to both improve workflow and save money, the firm embarked on a new approach to managing email searches and reducing the amount of data being processed.
Challenge
The firm actively uses a well-known email archiving system, but does not archive everything. While a firm-wide records retention policy exists, exceptions are
allowed for attorneys to retain emails considered relevant to any client or case. Because of this, large email files exist throughout the firm that may be
subject to discovery at any time.
An industry-leading eDiscovery processing platform is employed by the firm to handle data processing associated with any litigation, regulatory or compliance
matter involving discovery. The platform, however, has limitations—including the inability to ingest live mailboxes. This restriction requires the firm to
extract live mailboxes into PSTs and then ingest the PST files into the processing platform. Consequently, thousands of irrelevant emails are loaded
into the platform and processed, at a substantial cost to the firm, as they pay per gigabyte of data.
Solution
The firm now uses C2C’s Advanced Discovery to locate data in a live mailbox related to any particular matter, rather than ingesting whole mailboxes into the data
processing platform. By setting a search based on an email address, the firm can search hundreds of thousands of emails and reduce them to just a few
hundred – or even a handful – before loading the data into its processing platform.
Results
By searching live mailboxes and PST files for only relevant information first, the amount of data being extracted and then ingested for eDiscovery processing is
substantially lower than if entire mailboxes were processed. The reduction in volume equates to significant dollar savings for every production.
Summary
C2C’s Advanced Discovery offers a unique ability to work seamlessly with other technologies, including email archiving systems and discovery processing
platforms, to improve the discovery process. Advanced Discovery delivers substantial cost savings to this firm and other clients who employ the tool to
effectively cull live mailboxes for only relevant data to be ingested into eDiscovery processing tools.
C2C provides the ability to perform a variety of searches on live mailboxes. In the case of this firm, C2C is being used to search:
- An average of 10-15 matters per year
- Around 25-50 unique mailboxes per search
- For external matters, either requested from within or from outside the firm
- For internal (employee) investigations
- For an address from up to 150 external addresses
- For email address regardless of whether it occurs in the “From,” “To,” “Cc” or “Bcc” field
- Within any date range
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