CYFOR Blog

CYFOR saved its client weeks by making data instantly accessible.

Summary

eDisclosure and digital forensics specialist CYFOR was providing eDiscovery services to a law firm on a large litigation involving more than 250 custodians across 10 locations. During the evidence collection and processing phase of the investigation, for which CYFOR used Nuix eDiscovery software, the law firm and its client made an urgent request to review the data in order to meet a court deadline. CYFOR advised that rather than moving the incomplete data to a review platform, which would add time and expense, the law firm could use Nuix Web Review & Analytics to provide its team of five reviewers with instant secure access to the case data.

•       Processed a volume and variety of data that other eDiscovery platforms could not handle

•       Made processed data instantly accessible through a web browser

•       Avoided set-up and hosting costs of a review platform

•       Delivered an intuitive interface that lawyers could use with minimal training

•       Provided highly capable search and analytics to locate the facts

The Challenge

CYFOR specializes in supporting law firms, enterprises, and public institutions with digital forensics, eDiscovery (edisclosure), and information security services. Headquartered in Manchester, United Kingdom with offices in Aylesbury and London, CYFOR’s team of more than 30 specialists has expertise in digital forensics; eDiscovery; data collection; mobile phone and PDA forensics; phonetic disclosure; audio visual forensics; incident response; cell site analysis; forensic readiness planning; and vulnerability assessment. CYFOR’s dedicated civil investigations & eDisclosure team handles all aspects of electronic disclosure, from initial investigation to collection, processing, and production of responsive data.

When engaged by a law firm client involved in litigation, CYFOR collects data onsite, brings it to one of two labs for processing, runs it through a series of filtering workflows, then puts the resulting smaller data set into an online review platform where the law firm and its end client can access it.

“The law firms may not have a clear idea of where the data relevant to the case is, so we can deploy and collect the entire electronic evidential universe at the end client’s premises,” said Lawrie Hall, Head of Civil Litigation and eDisclosure at CYFOR. “This ‘no stone unturned’ approach means that when it comes to disclosure, the evidence would definitely be within the pile to start with.”

This wide collection approach, though scalable, has no practical limit to the data available. It inevitably results in very large volumes of data to handle for CYFOR, the law firm, and the litigant.

One such case, which CYFOR began working on in October 2014, involved more than 200 custodians spread across 10 regional offices around Europe.

“Each custodian may feasibly have a laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet and physical paper documents as well as email and documents on file shares,” explained Hall. “In this case, by the time we had collected the data for half the custodians, the total was already more than 30 terabytes.

“In most cases we would complete collection and processing before helping to prepare the case strategy, but in here the law firm said ‘We need to see some of this data you are collecting as soon as possible’, so they could meet a court imposed deadline. If we had exported the data to our usual review platform, this would have required the client to pay for ingestion onto the review platform twice.”

Solution

CYFOR was using Nuix eDiscovery to process tens of terabytes of data. Rather than export the data to a review platform, CYFOR decided to use Nuix’s newly released Web Review & Analytics package to provide access to the data that had already been processed.

Nuix Web Review & Analytics delivers fast, collaborative eDiscovery review and true early case assessment from any web browser. This powerful application provides secure and compartmentalized access to case data for multiple reviewers, lawyers, subject matter experts and external parties—and it rapidly scales to tens or hundreds of reviewers per case, without complex databases or tricky client plugins.

“Nuix sent two senior technical people to our Manchester office to help us install Web Review & Analytics and give us demonstrations on how to make the most of the tool,” said Joel Tobias, Managing Director of CYFOR. “As we started to use the tool, Nuix responded to any small queries we had exceptionally fast. And they hosted an online webinar with our law firm client to resolve any difficulties they had.”

Results – Unmatched processing abilities

Nuix eDiscovery was the only platform that could process quickly enough to handle the volume and breadth of data involved in this large and time-critical case.

“The capability of Nuix exceeds other processing tools we have; it can interrogate almost any dataset where other processing tools cannot,” said Hall. “It can process data faster, and it processes it in a format which is ideal for the review stage.”

CYFOR had confidence that the data is made available to its client using Nuix Web Review & Analytics was comprehensive and accurate.

CYFOR Managing Director, Joel Tobias, said,

“Having such sophisticated technologies at one’s disposal must be underlined by people with the skills to use it to best effect. With our close advice and support our client could search for specific keywords, apply date ranges, use advanced search expressions, and the rest. With tags and secured fields set up, the client could differentiate relevant and non-relevant items for future reference.”

Instant access to processed data

Nuix Web Review & Analytics uses the same case file format as Nuix’s other eDiscovery products. For CYFOR, this meant the data was available for review as soon as processing was complete.

“The client had a specific, court-imposed deadline and it would have taken a long time to move the data from the Nuix server into another review tool,” said Tobias. “Keeping the data within Nuix meant the client could carry out an early case assessment of their data using an online platform. This saved days and potentially weeks for the client.”

Intuitive lawyer-friendly interface

CYFOR trained the team of five reviewers within the client law firm, who very quickly picked up how to use Nuix Web Review & Analytics.

“I regularly train lawyers on review platforms; they see an awful lot of review tools and can find it a challenging part of their role, but the feedback on Nuix Web Review & Analytics has been extremely positive,” said Hall. “They like that it opens up to a very simple interface and gives them icons for all the different types of data they can look at, such as emails, pictures, or PDFs.

“Nuix Web Review & Analytics is my favourite review platform to train customers to use, because I know the lawyers will get the most out of the time I spend training them.”

“We currently have three clients with cases hosted on Nuix Web Review & Analytics and they have all given my team positive feedback,” added Tobias. “After an hour’s training session with our clients, they have enough understanding to navigate around the tool and search for the data they are looking for.”