CHALLENGE
Litigation cases often
involve tens of thousands of documents from multiple sources that must be
thoroughly vetted for any relevant references to the key issues of the case.
Very often, a small percentage of those documents contain the most important
information, and such information is not always immediately apparent, or
readily accessible from available documents. The failure to ensure that all relevant
information is at the disposal of the litigating team in a timely and
context-relevant manner can severely compromise the quality of the team's case.
Current industry practice
typically involves one or both of the following steps:
- Outsourced or
in-house staff conducting manual "brute force", line-by-line reviews
of documents provided by opposing counsel.
- Ingesting voluminous material into the"front end" of commonly used eDiscovery
"platform" applications (e.g. Summation, SharePoint,
Documentum, Autonomy and more) that typical use traditional semantic search technology to surface references that
contain the exact terms that are entered by the research.
Research Directors at leading legal firms, and published articles be eDiscovery
authorities repeatedly cite three major problems with current industry
practices:
- "Brute
force" document review is notoriously inconsistent, subject as it is to
variations in the knowledge and dedication of the individuals performing the
review.
- The direct and
associated overhead cost of manual document review can readily reach into the
mid-six-figures for complicated cases. Although the direct cost is typically billable to the client, there is increasing client resistance to paying large
sums for what they view as a low value-added service.
- Traditional
semantic search application often leave critical information undiscovered, because they are incapable of surfacing terms and information that are related
to, but not literally the same term as terms keypunched by the researcher.
SOLUTION
Proof of concept evaluations
involving side- by-side comparisons of iQuest Discovery with "brute
force" and traditional semantic search technology applications by Research
Directors of prominent legal firms has conclusively demonstrated that:
- iQuest Discovery
provides much more comprehensive information than other approaches, at a
fraction of the time, and at a cost that is less than half of that of
alternative applications.
- The need for
manual "brute force" review is completely eliminated. Documents are
automatically ingested into the iQuest Discovery.
- Our application
is not intended to be a replacement for a "Total Solution" platform
like Summation. iQuest Discovery greatly enhances the value of "Total
Solution" platforms by ensuring that the "front end" of the
Discovery process--the comprehensive capturing of all documented information
that has relevant bearing on a case--is fully optimized.
