The Impact of Business Intelligence

Transforming Discovery With BI

The business of legal discovery ' as embodied by outside counsel, consultants, and discovery service providers ' is in need of the same transformative impact. It has been estimated that eDiscovery comprises some 70% of the total cost of litigation for cases that do not go to trial, a huge cost component for corporate counsel seeking to make informed business decisions around litigation strategy, investigations and compliance, overall risk tolerance, and more. See http://tinyurl.com/qcx75cg. The continuously growing volumes and varied nature of electronically stored information (ESI) make eDiscovery a prime target for optimization and insight through BI.

In particular, the process of document review accounts for 7% of total eDiscovery costs. See http://tinyurl.com/8xzxcez. To control these costs, as well as the time and quality of document review, litigation practitioners need to know as much as possible about their teams' activities and the data they're reviewing on a case-by-case basis, such as:

• Which reviewers are achieving higher (and lower) productivity?
• When and how are they getting their best work done?
• Where are they finding critical documents, and what data types are they?
• Which review environments are yielding the best results?
• How do these results change when I go from issue-to-issue, day-to-day, reviewer-to-reviewer and data type-to-data type?

In document review, as in so many areas, knowledge is power. Knowing early on that a particular reviewer is responsible for a high percentage of second-pass overturns empowers personnel decisions. Knowing that certain reviewers are consistently coding for certain issues but missing others empowers targeted training activity. In addition, knowing that reviewers in a particular office or virtual environment are achieving better hourly review rates than in another empowers technology and resource allocation as well as budget planning and expectation management.

By providing total, user-driven visibility into a legal team's eDiscovery processes, BI helps case managers organize and improve review efforts and environments, staff review projects more intelligently, budget more predictably, and even enhance the accuracy and consistency of both linear and technology assisted review (TAR). With BI, updating corporate counsel on active litigation is a matter of clarity, not guesswork.

Beyond reviewer performance and tactics, BI can provide further insight into the effectiveness of data preservation, collection and processing procedures by illuminating managers in real time about what reviewers are finding in the data. Such knowledge not only helps counsel spot potentially costly gaps and inconsistencies early in active litigation, it can also inform information governance and data retention policies at the corporate level.

Depth and Ease of Analysis

True BI is about far more than reports ' it's about empowering case managers at corporations, law firms or managed review service providers to self-direct their inquiries and explore the available data freely. It's about their being able to save, update and share their results easily. It's about their learning from what the data tells them so they can take meaningful action. To understand the metrics around a document review process requires deeper insights than pre-canned, static reports can provide; users need to be able to ask new 'questions on the fly and follow where the data leads.

For this to work effectively, data mining through review activity needs to be intuitive for the average user, not just data scientists. Interactive 'visualizations provide crucial elements here. Modern, click-and-drag interfaces can enable case managers to start analyzing right away without a training session or a user manual. They can work with data in purely visualized formats – colorful charts and graphs – without having to manipulate the underlying hard numbers. For legal process managers used to working with interminable spreadsheets, using a good BI solution is (almost) fun.

Beyond Review Efficiency

Adding true BI capabilities to eDiscovery review is really the 'beginning for better process optimization and insight, not an end in itself. The vision is to leverage analytics and visualizations to surface valuable insights into all aspects of the data discovery process, for informed discovery management, decision-making and case negotiation and strategy. As the technology evolves, we will see other data types begin to surface for BI analysis and the introduction of even more out-of-the-box dashboards.

Over time, however, it is users themselves that may drive the most important innovations, as they will have the ability to introduce their own pertinent data sources related to their legal and business processes for a 360-degree view. By providing a true BI layer to explore the time, cost and quality of all aspects of eDiscovery, we hope to see this technology help legal teams achieve an informed, analytics-driven approach to budget and process management, risk tolerance decision-making and strategic legal positioning.

Since Interactive BI dashboards provide real-time insights into review team performance and document coding decisions, such BI innovations would undoubtedly provide a well-received infusion of actionable intelligence to the time-honored business known as the practice of law.

Hal Marcus is the Product Marketing Manager for Recommind. An active member of the California State Bar, Marcus has led in-firm MCLE presentations and legal industry seminars, and written for publications by local bar associations, ILTA, and the ABA Litigation Section.

Businesses across a range of industries see the value in optimizing their processes, as doing so can have a significant impact on both their top and bottom lines. The challenge has always been how to gain insight into the areas of inefficiency and execute a plan to optimize. Historically, business decisions were made on “gut feelings” based on imperfect information.

This is where business intelligence (BI), which is defined as “the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes ' ” has been transformative, helping businesses in ” … Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights.” See Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy by Olivia Parr Rud (http://tinyurl.com/kav4ujs).

BI enables businesses to optimize their processes by leveraging dynamic interactive dashboards containing the most current ' if not live ' data. Manufacturing companies, for example, have been able to implement “just in time” supply chain management, holding just days of stock, instead of weeks or months. This process is made possible through the use of BI to balance stock and component supply against the sales demand and pipeline.

Transforming Discovery With BI

The business of legal discovery ' as embodied by outside counsel, consultants, and discovery service providers ' is in need of the same transformative impact. It has been estimated that eDiscovery comprises some 70% of the total cost of litigation for cases that do not go to trial, a huge cost component for corporate counsel seeking to make informed business decisions around litigation strategy, investigations and compliance, overall risk tolerance, and more. See http://tinyurl.com/qcx75cg. The continuously growing volumes and varied nature of electronically stored information (ESI) make eDiscovery a prime target for optimization and insight through BI.

In particular, the process of document review accounts for 7% of total eDiscovery costs. See http://tinyurl.com/8xzxcez. To control these costs, as well as the time and quality of document review, litigation practitioners need to know as much as possible about their teams' activities and the data they're reviewing on a case-by-case basis, such as:

• Which reviewers are achieving higher (and lower) productivity?
• When and how are they getting their best work done?
• Where are they finding critical documents, and what data types are they?
• Which review environments are yielding the best results?
• How do these results change when I go from issue-to-issue, day-to-day, reviewer-to-reviewer and data type-to-data type?

In document review, as in so many areas, knowledge is power. Knowing early on that a particular reviewer is responsible for a high percentage of second-pass overturns empowers personnel decisions. Knowing that certain reviewers are consistently coding for certain issues but missing others empowers targeted training activity. In addition, knowing that reviewers in a particular office or virtual environment are achieving better hourly review rates than in another empowers technology and resource allocation as well as budget planning and expectation management.

By providing total, user-driven visibility into a legal team's eDiscovery processes, BI helps case managers organize and improve review efforts and environments, staff review projects more intelligently, budget more predictably, and even enhance the accuracy and consistency of both linear and technology assisted review (TAR). With BI, updating corporate counsel on active litigation is a matter of clarity, not guesswork.

Beyond reviewer performance and tactics, BI can provide further insight into the effectiveness of data preservation, collection and processing procedures by illuminating managers in real time about what reviewers are finding in the data. Such knowledge not only helps counsel spot potentially costly gaps and inconsistencies early in active litigation, it can also inform information governance and data retention policies at the corporate level.

Depth and Ease of Analysis

True BI is about far more than reports ' it's about empowering case managers at corporations, law firms or managed review service providers to self-direct their inquiries and explore the available data freely. It's about their being able to save, update and share their results easily. It's about their learning from what the data tells them so they can take meaningful action. To understand the metrics around a document review process requires deeper insights than pre-canned, static reports can provide; users need to be able to ask new 'questions on the fly and follow where the data leads.

For this to work effectively, data mining through review activity needs to be intuitive for the average user, not just data scientists. Interactive 'visualizations provide crucial elements here. Modern, click-and-drag interfaces can enable case managers to start analyzing right away without a training session or a user manual. They can work with data in purely visualized formats – colorful charts and graphs – without having to manipulate the underlying hard numbers. For legal process managers used to working with interminable spreadsheets, using a good BI solution is (almost) fun.

Beyond Review Efficiency

Adding true BI capabilities to eDiscovery review is really the 'beginning for better process optimization and insight, not an end in itself. The vision is to leverage analytics and visualizations to surface valuable insights into all aspects of the data discovery process, for informed discovery management, decision-making and case negotiation and strategy. As the technology evolves, we will see other data types begin to surface for BI analysis and the introduction of even more out-of-the-box dashboards.

Over time, however, it is users themselves that may drive the most important innovations, as they will have the ability to introduce their own pertinent data sources related to their legal and business processes for a 360-degree view. By providing a true BI layer to explore the time, cost and quality of all aspects of eDiscovery, we hope to see this technology help legal teams achieve an informed, analytics-driven approach to budget and process management, risk tolerance decision-making and strategic legal positioning.

Since Interactive BI dashboards provide real-time insights into review team performance and document coding decisions, such BI innovations would undoubtedly provide a well-received infusion of actionable intelligence to the time-honored business known as the practice of law.

Hal Marcus is the Product Marketing Manager for Recommind. An active member of the California State Bar, Marcus has led in-firm MCLE presentations and legal industry seminars, and written for publications by local bar associations, ILTA, and the ABA Litigation Section.