The Inaugural Study
Litigants
on both sides of the “v.”, as well as judges and academics, have long
been interested in obtaining independent studies comparing the time,
cost and accuracy of traditional, manual document review processes with
the use of electronic document review tools. If it is shown through
such studies that electronic applications can reliably improve the
results of manual document review (or are at least as good), litigants
stand to save millions of dollars in review costs, with better results.
The largest component of discovery for litigation or investigation involves the process of humans reviewing documents to determine if they are (a) relevant to the matter and (b) subject to a privilege that would protect them from disclosure. In recent years, several services and software vendors have developed sophisticated processes and tools for automating document reviews. To date, however, there have been no objective third-party studies to prove how these processes and tools compare to human review as to quality, cost, and timeliness.
The Institute's inaugural study compares modern review technologies with a manual review process completed to respond to a Department of Justice document request.
The Data
The Data Provider: A Fortune 20 US Company
Data Provider, seeking to acquire a Fortune 100 competitor in 2005, responded to a Department of Justice Second Request for Documents by performing a traditional human review of a large volume of data involving nearly 80 custodians:
Starting point:
- 1 .5 million email messages
- .3 million loose files
- .6 million scanned documents
Eliminating duplicates, humans reviewed over 1.9 million items
Human document review time involved 150 people over 10 elapsed weeks
Resulting contract lawyer costs: over $4 million
Produced to DOJ: over 150,000 items
Processing Vendor costs for supporting the document review: over $3 million
The Institute's inaugural study compares modern review technologies with a manual review process that was prepared in response to a Department of Justice document request.
The Results
Final results will be published in 2008.