Document Review
During the last five years, additional computer-assisted and offshore contract review have emerged to supplement traditional approaches to information review and analysis. FBT has worked with both of these resources and either may provide additional time- and cost-saving advantages in appropriate situations. For computer-assisted (or “augmented”) review, both technology and consulting provider(s) must be measured against the types of data in question and need for precision in a particular case. Offshore resources also must be vetted for reliability, and agreements must include appropriate assurances of compliance with applicable U.S. law (such as HIPAA or Gramm-Leach-Bliley) as well as supervisory requirements of U.S. legal ethics rules. In applying these capabilities, FBT’s review group builds upon its history of superior litigation support.
Practice Highlights
- From 1992 to 2005, FBT supplied staff paralegals and attorneys for a tobacco company to assist in the discovery phase of tobacco litigation conducted across the country. The tobacco team’s initial task was to collect and review documents for various productions. Each document review included screening for confidentiality, trade secret and privilege. The tobacco team ultimately collected, reviewed and produced hardcopies of approximately 25 million pages in over 100 cases in jurisdictions throughout the United States and around the world.1 The team also managed the storage and retrieval of over 80,000 boxes of hardcopy documents and media.
- In a recently-concluded insurance class action defense matter, multiple clients provided more than 600 gigabytes of native-format data for possible use in defending the case. Using inexpensive search and retrieval tools for direct review and prescreening of relevant information, the e-discovery team reduced the volume of data flowing to the litigation team by more than 90%, at an estimated cost savings of up to $1 million compared to quoted commercial alternatives.
- FBT performed responsiveness and privilege review of more than 2.2 million documents in less than 90 days. The use of native-format review and an electronic repository produced client savings exceeding $250,000, compared either to traditional review methods or commercial alternatives.
- FBT performed responsiveness and privilege review of more than 300,000 pages of documents from 21 server & local hard drives in less than 30 days, including review of image and multimedia data types, which cannot be handled through typical keyword searching.
1 It is estimated that the team reviewed and produced an additional 15 million pages in electronic in electronic form during its tenure.
