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Reducing data volumes for eDisclosure is crucial if solicitors are to have the most relevant data to analyse that is pertinent to their case.

eDisclosure can produce huge volumes of data, also known as electronically stored information (ESI). It’s impractical for a solicitor to review every item of ESI within a litigation or dispute resolution matter. There are various sophisticated and effective filtering and data culling techniques which effective for reducing data volumes, narrowing a data set before document review is initiated. These techniques drastically reduce processing and review time-frames as well as associated costs in the process.

Data Reduction Techniques

Date Range: Ensuring that the documents viewed are solely from the time frame associated with the issue will dramatically reduce the overall number of documents. Typically, computers have documents spanning a range of years, so this crucial.

Keywords: The volume of data within an eDisclosure case can be vast. Strategic electronic keyword searches are one of many tools which can be invaluable in the reduction of data. A successful keyword search will reduce the costs to clients as well as the overall time the matter will take to review.

File Type: Limiting review to only the document file types most likely ‘user-created’ can dramatically speed up the process. For example, Office files and PDF’s. Ignoring system and multi-media files will assist in this process.

De-duplication: This ensures that you can reduce your data set to only one unique and relevant copy when culling the overall data. Failing to do this will inevitably increase the time spent reviewing as well as costs.

Custodians: Only collecting and reviewing data from the individuals you know are involved in a case can speed up the process. This can be expanded further down the line to incorporate an increased number of custodians; however, best practice is to ‘collect wide and review small’.

Case Study | Reducing Data Volumes

The following is a brief, step by step case study of a data reduction exercise completed for a client.

• The email accounts and documents of 10 x custodians were collected.
• The client requested that the data be put on hold as they were still going through the initial disclosure phase, where they had to provide key documents which were going to be relied upon in support of their claim.
• The total number of user-created documents was 3,328,435.
• As the client knew this was too large a volume of data to search through – the initial disclosure allowed them to focus on the key documents and agree on keywords with the other side.
• After instructing CYFOR to focus on just one exhibit with a date range applied, we were able to reduce the document size to 935,000.
• Search terms were then applied across the data set using the Nuix processing tool. This further reduced the document count to 31,000.
• All these elements were actioned before the documents were ever uploaded to the Relativity online review platform. Saving the client considerable time attempting to search themselves and not incurring Relativity hosting fees until the final document count was produced.