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How Fulbright & Jaworski Transformed Its Document Review Process
As e-discovery practitioners, our goal is to make the process for our clients more manageable and as cost-effective as possible. We sought to automate and streamline the process through the application of strategic technology and well-developed workflows. Our firm, Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P, was an early adopter of Recommind's Axcelerate eDiscovery' platform, having implemented the solution internally in early 2008. Fulbright's strategic deployment of Axcelerate eDiscovery and particularly the firm's use of Predictive Coding' functionality, combined with concept clustering and data analytics has revolutionized document review, therefore reducing time and costs.
The Story
In 2007, we recognized the need to acquire new technology to help address our clients' increasing e-discovery costs, driven by growing volumes of electronic data. One of the first law firms in the country to implement a Web-based litigation support system, Fulbright has long hosted large data volumes for the purpose of conducting linear document review, performing complex searches and preparing electronic document productions. Meanwhile, we recognized the need to leverage advanced technology to more effectively analyze, filter and strategically organize large document populations, while reducing document review costs.
In a typical e-discovery project, data would routinely be culled and filtered using file types, date ranges and keywords, followed by a linear, eyes-on attorney review. This approach to document review has been a generally accepted practice for years, and works relatively well for many cases. As client data volumes continued to increase in size and complexity, and strategic search methodologies began to emerge and evolve, the opportunity for a new strategy was apparent.
The benefits and necessity of an alternative approach to document review can be easily demonstrated using one recent experience.
One of our clients was performing an internal review and engaged the firm to conduct an early case assessment to determine the validity and severity of the matter. The case team's objective was to quickly identify documents that would help senior attorneys assess the scope of the matter and prepare for custodian interviews. The client provided an unfiltered universe of approximately 500,000 documents, including e-mails and attachments. The corpus of data was expected to contain relevant material, but the issues did not lend themselves to traditional keyword searching.
Using a linear approach to review this volume at a rate of 50 documents per hour would require a minimum of 10,000 review hours and incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, even with contract attorneys to conduct first pass review.
The Challenge
In this example, our legal team needed to prioritize and review highly relevant material within two weeks. Without the appropriate technology, identifying and prioritizing all of the key documents among a highly diverse data set in a timely and cost effective manner would be very challenging and imprecise. This challenge is not unlike the vast majority of cases today.
The Solution
As we started to evaluate the e-discovery technology industry, meet with software providers and test potential solutions to problems such as the example mentioned above, three distinct selection criteria were defined: supportability, efficiency and defensibility. After examining four leading systems and conducting a proof-of-concept, Recommind's Axcelerate eDiscovery system best met the selection criteria, while also working with existing technologies.
From the outset of our internal deployment of Axcelerate, attorneys began to recognize how this technology could help gain greater transparency into client data, thereby innovating their approach to e-discovery and enhancing their practice by enabling them to: 1) quickly identify highly relevant material; 2) more thoroughly evaluate the scope of discovery; and 3) define key issues early. For the first time, data began to truly reveal itself to attorneys through concept clusters and Predictive Coding'. This type of functionality is a game changer in the e-discovery industry. It has altered the way our teams approach litigation and investigations, while substantially reducing client review costs.
Fulbright takes a multifaceted approach to its application of Axcelerate's functionality. When data is first loaded into Axcelerate, documents are automatically sorted into concept groups. Legal teams leverage concept groups to identify a key set of documents based on their knowledge of the case. The majority of relevant documents are often concentrated within just a few concept groups. This Smart Review' functionality helps to direct reviewers toward relevant documents before the review starts. Attorneys then begin to review and code pre-sorted documents, prioritizing those that are clearly of importance and deferring those that are obviously irrelevant or ancillary. This process improves the quality and efficiency of the document review. It also provides an intelligent and adaptable guide to formulate additional search criteria.
As the initial set of documents are tagged by reviewers, the results
are analyzed using Axcelerate's Predictive Coding feature, which: 1) learns from actual attorney decisions; 2) trains the system to identify similar documents; and 3) presents reviewers with additional, un-reviewed documents that are most likely to match the attorneys' coding criteria.
As attorneys continue to analyze and code additional documents, we use the system to iteratively identify additional material until there is a high level of confidence that the system is no longer returning new, relevant material. This process allows attorneys to apply critical thinking to highly relevant material without being significantly distracted by irrelevant content, thereby eliminating the most tedious and costly elements of document review.
Document review is further enhanced through Axcelerate's near duplicate and thread detection. By streamlining reviewer access to duplicative content and messages from the same thread, an attorney's attention is better concentrated on documents related to similar issues.
The result is a more accurate and consistent review, which can be completed far more quickly and much more cost-effectively. As Axcelerate is being deployed throughout our practice areas, document review rates have improved by an average of 60%. Using Axcelerate, attorneys are able to achieve an average rate of review of 80 documents per hour, and have reached as many as 120 documents per hour.
The Results
To put the benefits of this strategy in context, consider the actual outcome of the early case assessment mentioned above. After coding an initial “seed set” of key documents, 67% of the records suggested through the first round of Predictive Coding were determined to be accurate suggestions based on attorney review. Additional review and computer training was conducted, yielding fewer and fewer additional documents. The chart below illustrates the number of actual key documents returned by the system.
[IMGCAP(1)]
After approximately 12 days of review and 10 training iterations, the firm's legal team was confident that the results of the review were sufficient for their early case assessment. By leveraging all of the functionality of the system, they reviewed 38,000 documents out of 500,000 (less than 8%), using only eight document reviewers. By putting over 460,000 unfiltered documents aside for later analysis, our team was able to accomplish the task at hand and save thousands of hours of document review.
The Future
Axcelerate's Predictive Coding, combined with its strong feature set, help reveal highly relevant material early and efficiently. No technology can replace critical legal thinking, but this technology helps our attorneys make the most of the information they have and brings greater focus to substantive legal issues on behalf of their clients.
With Axcelerate, we're doing more than lowering costs and improving the overall effectiveness of document review; we're also building a defensible, next-generation process that will be standardized throughout the firm. At this point, the technology has been employed enough to establish workflow guidelines and benchmarks that we are in the process of formalizing and rolling out internationally.
Laurie Weiss, Of Counsel for Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., is co-head of the firm's E-Discovery and Information Management practice group. She has enjoyed an active litigation practice for 22 years, after a 10-year career in business, including work with a service company providing computer-based risk management information services to major U.S. corporations. Tom Barce is the Assistant Director of Practice Support for the firm. He advises clients and attorneys on complex technical issues throughout the e-discovery lifecycle, manages service provider relationships, directs the evaluation and implementation of new strategic technologies, and oversees the department's technical operations.
As e-discovery practitioners, our goal is to make the process for our clients more manageable and as cost-effective as possible. We sought to automate and streamline the process through the application of strategic technology and well-developed workflows. Our firm,
The Story
In 2007, we recognized the need to acquire new technology to help address our clients' increasing e-discovery costs, driven by growing volumes of electronic data. One of the first law firms in the country to implement a Web-based litigation support system, Fulbright has long hosted large data volumes for the purpose of conducting linear document review, performing complex searches and preparing electronic document productions. Meanwhile, we recognized the need to leverage advanced technology to more effectively analyze, filter and strategically organize large document populations, while reducing document review costs.
In a typical e-discovery project, data would routinely be culled and filtered using file types, date ranges and keywords, followed by a linear, eyes-on attorney review. This approach to document review has been a generally accepted practice for years, and works relatively well for many cases. As client data volumes continued to increase in size and complexity, and strategic search methodologies began to emerge and evolve, the opportunity for a new strategy was apparent.
The benefits and necessity of an alternative approach to document review can be easily demonstrated using one recent experience.
One of our clients was performing an internal review and engaged the firm to conduct an early case assessment to determine the validity and severity of the matter. The case team's objective was to quickly identify documents that would help senior attorneys assess the scope of the matter and prepare for custodian interviews. The client provided an unfiltered universe of approximately 500,000 documents, including e-mails and attachments. The corpus of data was expected to contain relevant material, but the issues did not lend themselves to traditional keyword searching.
Using a linear approach to review this volume at a rate of 50 documents per hour would require a minimum of 10,000 review hours and incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, even with contract attorneys to conduct first pass review.
The Challenge
In this example, our legal team needed to prioritize and review highly relevant material within two weeks. Without the appropriate technology, identifying and prioritizing all of the key documents among a highly diverse data set in a timely and cost effective manner would be very challenging and imprecise. This challenge is not unlike the vast majority of cases today.
The Solution
As we started to evaluate the e-discovery technology industry, meet with software providers and test potential solutions to problems such as the example mentioned above, three distinct selection criteria were defined: supportability, efficiency and defensibility. After examining four leading systems and conducting a proof-of-concept, Recommind's Axcelerate eDiscovery system best met the selection criteria, while also working with existing technologies.
From the outset of our internal deployment of Axcelerate, attorneys began to recognize how this technology could help gain greater transparency into client data, thereby innovating their approach to e-discovery and enhancing their practice by enabling them to: 1) quickly identify highly relevant material; 2) more thoroughly evaluate the scope of discovery; and 3) define key issues early. For the first time, data began to truly reveal itself to attorneys through concept clusters and Predictive Coding'. This type of functionality is a game changer in the e-discovery industry. It has altered the way our teams approach litigation and investigations, while substantially reducing client review costs.
Fulbright takes a multifaceted approach to its application of Axcelerate's functionality. When data is first loaded into Axcelerate, documents are automatically sorted into concept groups. Legal teams leverage concept groups to identify a key set of documents based on their knowledge of the case. The majority of relevant documents are often concentrated within just a few concept groups. This Smart Review' functionality helps to direct reviewers toward relevant documents before the review starts. Attorneys then begin to review and code pre-sorted documents, prioritizing those that are clearly of importance and deferring those that are obviously irrelevant or ancillary. This process improves the quality and efficiency of the document review. It also provides an intelligent and adaptable guide to formulate additional search criteria.
As the initial set of documents are tagged by reviewers, the results
are analyzed using Axcelerate's Predictive Coding feature, which: 1) learns from actual attorney decisions; 2) trains the system to identify similar documents; and 3) presents reviewers with additional, un-reviewed documents that are most likely to match the attorneys' coding criteria.
As attorneys continue to analyze and code additional documents, we use the system to iteratively identify additional material until there is a high level of confidence that the system is no longer returning new, relevant material. This process allows attorneys to apply critical thinking to highly relevant material without being significantly distracted by irrelevant content, thereby eliminating the most tedious and costly elements of document review.
Document review is further enhanced through Axcelerate's near duplicate and thread detection. By streamlining reviewer access to duplicative content and messages from the same thread, an attorney's attention is better concentrated on documents related to similar issues.
The result is a more accurate and consistent review, which can be completed far more quickly and much more cost-effectively. As Axcelerate is being deployed throughout our practice areas, document review rates have improved by an average of 60%. Using Axcelerate, attorneys are able to achieve an average rate of review of 80 documents per hour, and have reached as many as 120 documents per hour.
The Results
To put the benefits of this strategy in context, consider the actual outcome of the early case assessment mentioned above. After coding an initial “seed set” of key documents, 67% of the records suggested through the first round of Predictive Coding were determined to be accurate suggestions based on attorney review. Additional review and computer training was conducted, yielding fewer and fewer additional documents. The chart below illustrates the number of actual key documents returned by the system.
[IMGCAP(1)]
After approximately 12 days of review and 10 training iterations, the firm's legal team was confident that the results of the review were sufficient for their early case assessment. By leveraging all of the functionality of the system, they reviewed 38,000 documents out of 500,000 (less than 8%), using only eight document reviewers. By putting over 460,000 unfiltered documents aside for later analysis, our team was able to accomplish the task at hand and save thousands of hours of document review.
The Future
Axcelerate's Predictive Coding, combined with its strong feature set, help reveal highly relevant material early and efficiently. No technology can replace critical legal thinking, but this technology helps our attorneys make the most of the information they have and brings greater focus to substantive legal issues on behalf of their clients.
With Axcelerate, we're doing more than lowering costs and improving the overall effectiveness of document review; we're also building a defensible, next-generation process that will be standardized throughout the firm. At this point, the technology has been employed enough to establish workflow guidelines and benchmarks that we are in the process of formalizing and rolling out internationally.
Laurie Weiss, Of Counsel for
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