Managing Litigation with Electronic Discovery and Prevail

In recent years, litigation matters have become even more difficult to manage due to the explosion of electronic data created by today's businesses. In defending our clients, we are often requested by opposing counsel to turn over all relevant data pertaining to a particular issue or issues. These discovery requests can be overwhelming, and often times are very costly for our clients and time-consuming for the litigation team. To help mitigate these costs and expedite the discovery process for our clients, we have turned to Fios' Prevail to help manage these requests.

Prevail is a Web-based discovery tool used by attorneys and litigation support professionals to review and ultimately produce electronic evidence. Prevail is created and hosted by Fios Inc., an electronic discovery company that provides data collection, processing, review and production services for law firms and enterprises.

Prevail acts as a window to the client's data, whether the data contains e-mails, word processing documents, spreadsheets, or any other format of electronic documents. Part of Fios' processing service involves rendering native documents to HTML, which is then hosted on Prevail for a discovery team to review. This review can be done by anyone with a fast Internet connection and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Fios' project managers provide free training via conference calls and Internet conference tools. The ability to access Fios from any location is especially helpful for our firm, as we have multiple offices located throughout the country. Fish & Richardson can now staff a large document review team with lawyers from other offices.

The fact that Fios provides a single HTML view for each document makes the review faster than downloading TIFF images, which is what most other Web-based review tools provide. For larger documents, having a single HTML view makes for a lot less clicking, as we don't have to click through each image or page. The HTML approach makes it possible to highlight search hits, select and highlight text for annotations, and copy text to the clipboard. The higher fidelity, more interactive nature of HTML also provides the opportunity for neat mouse-over effects, such as passing the mouse over a spreadsheet cell to see the formula that was used to generate the number.

Prevail offers the opportunity to download the original (native) file to the desktop. This is a very beneficial option, especially when viewing CAD or database files, which are not converted to HTML. There is a size limit for display of HTML documents of 1 to 3 MB (configurable). Anything over this size will only be available for download. This is done for speed of review. Based on experience, our firm has determined that there are very few documents over 3 MB that need to be viewed as HTML.

Reviewing Documents

Prevail has a Microsoft Outlook feel that makes it easy to understand. Its preview pane allows a document reviewer to manage a list of documents and, at the same, get a quick view of a particular document. But if your list of documents to review is extremely long, it often makes more sense to turn the preview pane off to dedicate more screen space to the list. It is very intuitive to double-click a document in the list to view it in full screen mode. Like a Web browser, Prevail provides forward and backward arrows that make navigating through the search results and individual documents very efficient.

We use Prevail primarily for categorizing or tagging documents as Relevant or Privileged. However, there are numerous ways to categorize a document or list of documents in Prevail. Simply right-clicking a document displays a short menu of functions, one of which is the fly-out category menu. Alternatively, you can keep the category checklist always displayed on the right side of the screen. If you are at the list level, there are a number of options for categorizing a group of documents at one time: check off individual items, select all the documents on the current screen, or select all the documents in the entire list. This feature alone saved a significant amount of time after running a keyword search on privilege terms and names. Lastly, if you'reviewing a chain of e-mails and attachments using Prevail's unique Chain Explorer tool, you can right click on the top-level e-mail and categorize everything in the chain at once.

Another time saver is the keyboard shortcuts supported throughout the application. It is amazing how much of a difference this makes when reviewing documents all day long. Prevail's shortcut keys work similar to other Windows programs: press and hold the ALT key and then press another key. For example, ALT-S runs a search.

To get a top-down view of how the original custodian structured his or her documents, we use Prevail's Folder View. Modeled after Windows Explorer, this view has been particularly useful after finding a hot document. It is very interesting to see what other documents the custodian stored in the same location and which may lead to other important documents. On a couple of occasions, the hot document turned into a “hotbed” of documents.

More Than Just Keyword Searching

Prevail offers one of the most comprehensive searching capabilities of any e-discovery tool, with both keyword and concept-based searching. With the concept searching, we can quickly find and review documents that are closely related, but that might not contain the exact same keywords within the items. A particularly useful feature for this is the Concept Analyzer. Here's how it works: Enter your search query (a list of terms or an entire paragraph or page pasted from a document) and click the Concept Analyzer button, that evaluates the query and displays a list of the top 100 terms conceptually related to the query. In effect, this function provides a sneak peek at the terms that would be highlighted in your results should you run the search. Because the terms in the list come directly from your document collection, you can use the Concept Analyzer to get an idea of what other similar keywords exist in your document collection.

Another useful feature that is part of the concept searching is the Concept Explore, which provides a list of the top 10 documents that are the most similar to the current document. We have found this feature to be very useful in identifying groups of documents that are “near duplicates,” or documents that are almost the same except for a few words here and there. That feature alone significantly reduces our review time.

Prevail in Action

As an online review tool, Prevail is overall easy to learn and use, and is a powerful way to lighten the burden of reviewing documents. The typical case managed by our law firm entails multiple discovery requests. With Prevail, we are able to manage the related requests much more efficiently and effectively for our clients.

In recent years, litigation matters have become even more difficult to manage due to the explosion of electronic data created by today's businesses. In defending our clients, we are often requested by opposing counsel to turn over all relevant data pertaining to a particular issue or issues. These discovery requests can be overwhelming, and often times are very costly for our clients and time-consuming for the litigation team. To help mitigate these costs and expedite the discovery process for our clients, we have turned to Fios' Prevail to help manage these requests.

Prevail is a Web-based discovery tool used by attorneys and litigation support professionals to review and ultimately produce electronic evidence. Prevail is created and hosted by Fios Inc., an electronic discovery company that provides data collection, processing, review and production services for law firms and enterprises.

Prevail acts as a window to the client's data, whether the data contains e-mails, word processing documents, spreadsheets, or any other format of electronic documents. Part of Fios' processing service involves rendering native documents to HTML, which is then hosted on Prevail for a discovery team to review. This review can be done by anyone with a fast Internet connection and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Fios' project managers provide free training via conference calls and Internet conference tools. The ability to access Fios from any location is especially helpful for our firm, as we have multiple offices located throughout the country. Fish & Richardson can now staff a large document review team with lawyers from other offices.

The fact that Fios provides a single HTML view for each document makes the review faster than downloading TIFF images, which is what most other Web-based review tools provide. For larger documents, having a single HTML view makes for a lot less clicking, as we don't have to click through each image or page. The HTML approach makes it possible to highlight search hits, select and highlight text for annotations, and copy text to the clipboard. The higher fidelity, more interactive nature of HTML also provides the opportunity for neat mouse-over effects, such as passing the mouse over a spreadsheet cell to see the formula that was used to generate the number.

Prevail offers the opportunity to download the original (native) file to the desktop. This is a very beneficial option, especially when viewing CAD or database files, which are not converted to HTML. There is a size limit for display of HTML documents of 1 to 3 MB (configurable). Anything over this size will only be available for download. This is done for speed of review. Based on experience, our firm has determined that there are very few documents over 3 MB that need to be viewed as HTML.

Reviewing Documents

Prevail has a Microsoft Outlook feel that makes it easy to understand. Its preview pane allows a document reviewer to manage a list of documents and, at the same, get a quick view of a particular document. But if your list of documents to review is extremely long, it often makes more sense to turn the preview pane off to dedicate more screen space to the list. It is very intuitive to double-click a document in the list to view it in full screen mode. Like a Web browser, Prevail provides forward and backward arrows that make navigating through the search results and individual documents very efficient.

We use Prevail primarily for categorizing or tagging documents as Relevant or Privileged. However, there are numerous ways to categorize a document or list of documents in Prevail. Simply right-clicking a document displays a short menu of functions, one of which is the fly-out category menu. Alternatively, you can keep the category checklist always displayed on the right side of the screen. If you are at the list level, there are a number of options for categorizing a group of documents at one time: check off individual items, select all the documents on the current screen, or select all the documents in the entire list. This feature alone saved a significant amount of time after running a keyword search on privilege terms and names. Lastly, if you'reviewing a chain of e-mails and attachments using Prevail's unique Chain Explorer tool, you can right click on the top-level e-mail and categorize everything in the chain at once.

Another time saver is the keyboard shortcuts supported throughout the application. It is amazing how much of a difference this makes when reviewing documents all day long. Prevail's shortcut keys work similar to other Windows programs: press and hold the ALT key and then press another key. For example, ALT-S runs a search.

To get a top-down view of how the original custodian structured his or her documents, we use Prevail's Folder View. Modeled after Windows Explorer, this view has been particularly useful after finding a hot document. It is very interesting to see what other documents the custodian stored in the same location and which may lead to other important documents. On a couple of occasions, the hot document turned into a “hotbed” of documents.

More Than Just Keyword Searching

Prevail offers one of the most comprehensive searching capabilities of any e-discovery tool, with both keyword and concept-based searching. With the concept searching, we can quickly find and review documents that are closely related, but that might not contain the exact same keywords within the items. A particularly useful feature for this is the Concept Analyzer. Here's how it works: Enter your search query (a list of terms or an entire paragraph or page pasted from a document) and click the Concept Analyzer button, that evaluates the query and displays a list of the top 100 terms conceptually related to the query. In effect, this function provides a sneak peek at the terms that would be highlighted in your results should you run the search. Because the terms in the list come directly from your document collection, you can use the Concept Analyzer to get an idea of what other similar keywords exist in your document collection.

Another useful feature that is part of the concept searching is the Concept Explore, which provides a list of the top 10 documents that are the most similar to the current document. We have found this feature to be very useful in identifying groups of documents that are “near duplicates,” or documents that are almost the same except for a few words here and there. That feature alone significantly reduces our review time.

Prevail in Action

As an online review tool, Prevail is overall easy to learn and use, and is a powerful way to lighten the burden of reviewing documents. The typical case managed by our law firm entails multiple discovery requests. With Prevail, we are able to manage the related requests much more efficiently and effectively for our clients.