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Advantages of an Evidence Management Repository

Discovery Services | WHITE PAPER

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2 | www.lexisnexis.com/discovery

Introduction

Discovery of electronically stored information has become a commonplace component of litigation in the United States. Yet the exponentially increasing volume of data being produced makes dealing with e-discovery anything but routine. As technology has advanced to create more and more electronic information, the tools to collect, fi lter, process, review and produce that information for discovery have advanced as well. This has been a necessity since sometimes more than a terabyte of data may be at issue in large civil litigation or government investigations.

Legal departments involved in discovery have two basic goals: to avoid the harsh sanctions that can result if discovery goes awry and to keep the costs of discovery within reasonable limits. One way of meeting these goals is to use an evidence management repository.

This white paper provides details on such a repository, which is a secure, high-capacity system providing for reuse of documents across multiple matters, rapid production of documents for review and the ability to accommodate any number of review teams on large, complex litigation matters.

What Is an Evidence Management Repository?

An evidence management repository is a master set of all relevant documents provided by the client. This master set of documents transcends the individual matter, comprising all documents that the client believes may be involved in litigation—currently or in the future. All of these documents are processed, indexed and sorted ahead of any delivery for review, so that they are available for quick assignment out to reviewers as a matter arises.

This litigation-ready document set is organized for maximum effi ciency and is designed to support multiple reviews being performed simultaneously against the same documents. This multi-purpose view saves the clients a signifi cant amount of time and effort, both in the processing and release of documents for review, as well as in improved delivery times and less duplication of effort. An effective evidence management repository is designed around a high-capacity, high-speed processing system to meet the needs of the quick turnaround required as electronic evidence is gathered and processed prior to review.

Who Should Use an Evidence Management Repository?

There are several different circumstances under which clients should consider using an evidence management repository:

Multiple Related Matters. In situations such as product liability, where multiple claims of failure may exist in multiple cases, there may be varying degrees of overlap between the different cases. This leads to potential effi ciencies in sourcing discovery review in all of these cases from the same evidence management repository. The client saves money and time by processing all potentially relevant documents once and then reusing those documents in as many matters as needed. Work product can be reused or shared between related cases as well. There are also additional benefi ts in regard to risk management, as the ability to compare review work on the same document used in multiple matters reduces the possibility of treating the same document differently in multiple matters (unless such a decision is an active one, made after reviewing the different treatments). There are also fewer questions about what documents are available for each matter, since all documents are sourced from the same, known superset.

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| 3Advantages of an Evidence Management Repository


Large Matter With Multiple Review Teams. In a situation where a client is facing a single, large-scale matter where time is of the essence, having different segments of the document set reviewed by different fi rms or review teams may expedite the process. This allows the client or fi rm to leverage the particular strengths of each team within a segregated workspace where each individual team’s work product is its own and private, but which also may be merged back together and compared, should the client feel it is necessary prior to production of discovery responses. Because each team has its own independent, segregated view into the superset of client documents, each can perform its own review without impinging on the others.

Multiple Levels of Review. Another situation where the evidence management repository provides superior results is in cases where multiple levels of review are involved, such as contract attorney situations where there is an initial review for privilege that is subject to in-house or staff attorney review to ensure that non-disclosure decisions are proper. In these situations, each of the different “levels” of review would have its own view into the document set, with results from the fi rst level populating the second, results from the second populating the third, and so on.

Production of Reviewed Documents. The last situation that is expedited by an evidence management repository is that of providing a secure view into documents that have been reviewed. This could be production of discovery results to opposing counsel or a government body via the review application associated with the repository, or it could be for review by expert witnesses or even in camera review by judges. Because all of the documents provided by the client are stored in the repository, and any redactions or annotations are stored in relation to their appropriate cases, clients can be assured that the view they are providing to external parties is secure and contains only the documents (and versions of documents) that they wish them to have access to.

What Does an Evidence Management Repository Look Like?

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Doc Set 2

Doc Set 3

DocumentsProvided by Client Document

Repository (NAS)Document

Preparations Process(GRID-Enabled)

Expansion Conversion

IndexingFittering

Doc Set 1

WorkProduct

WorkProduct

WorkProduct

Case #1

Case #2

Case #3

RepositoryDatabaseand Index

Figure 1: Architecture of an Evidence Management Repository

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The primary goal of an evidence management repository is to allow related cases to share a single source of documents and data. In the example above, the document repository, located on a Network Accessed Storage (NAS) system, contains all of the documents that have successfully been prepared for review. The repository database and index contain all of the pertinent information about these documents (metadata, full-text indexing, conceptual analysis, etc.). Both of these are shared by the individual cases (Case #1 – Case #3), each of which has its own, independent work product database.

The document preparation process as it exists above is a high-capacity, high-speed, “GRID-enabled” process that uses multiple computer systems working in parallel to leverage their combined computing power at high levels of effi ciency. This results in reduced costs to the vendor as well as the client, as resources are allocated when and where they are most needed, as they are needed, rather than processing occurring in a serial, one-step-at-a-time model. To gain further effi ciencies, the document preparation process delivers its data directly to the repository database and index, and not to the individual cases themselves. This data is then pushed out in smaller pieces to the related cases, reducing the potential for blocking issues or failures that may result in downtime on the actual review systems. If something occurs on the repository database, the end user/reviewer may never be bothered and in fact may never know there was an outage at all.

Key Features of an Evidence Management Repository

Capacity. An evidence management repository must be capable of storing and processing extremely large numbers of documents and storing large amounts of data related to those documents. The repository itself should be able to support at least 3 terabytes of incoming data, with an upper limit of no less than 6 terabytes. As clients gain more experience with the system, and see the benefi ts paying off, they are more likely to provide signifi cantly more data to be processed and staged for future litigation matters. The review side of the system should support hundreds of concurrent users. This allows the type of large-scale review that is necessary when dealing with millions of potentially relevant electronic documents.

Security. Ensuring that documents are viewable only by those who should have access, as well as ensuring that work product is not passively shared between review teams protects the clients’ data and attorney work product. While a fi rst level of security is provided by breaking the case review database apart from the repository database (limiting the total number of documents any user in the system has access to), there are additional levels of security that should be taken into consideration. Access rights should be fully customizable by case administrators to allow or disallow functional access rights as well as view and modify access rights. These permissions should be controlled both on an individual, as well as group, basis. The more customizable and confi gurable these security access rights are, the more control the case administrators have over what data can be viewed and by whom it can be viewed.

In addition to the security required between cases and around documents, the entire system should meet industry-standard security guidelines—fi rewalls to prevent unauthorized access from the outside world, encrypted communications between the end user and the review application as well as between the review application and the review databases and fi le stores, intrusion detection to trigger response plans in the event of an attempted security breach, and virus scanning to ensure that documents being processed do not corrupt the document repository or client systems.

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Cross-Case Searching and Work Product Synchronization. One area that is of growing importance to the ultimate clients involved in multiple related cases, particularly if they’re being handled by different law fi rms, or by different teams of contract review attorneys, is the ability to search data across multiple related cases. This allows the client to both “check the work” of a reviewing law fi rm in comparison to the work being done on another case (either prior or pending), as well as to ensure that similar sets of documents are being used where such use is appropriate. Similarly, when corporate counsel provides a level of review, they may wish to apply their decisions to multiple cases (such as in a situation where there may be an email that is clearly attorney-client privilege, no matter what the issue at hand). Permitting the counsel to either immediately apply such work product to a document, or to allow the client to synchronize work product between multiple related cases is another key function that allows the evidence management repository to minimize redundant review work.

Workfl ow. Workfl ow support should be built in to the front-end application that enables review in cases based on an evidence management repository infrastructure. Examples of functionality that support a workfl ow approach include batch assignment of documents to sets of reviewers as they are released for review, detailed rule-based enforcement of relationships between tagging options (for example, a document may not be tagged as both responsive and privileged), and auditing systems that ensure consistent treatment of documents both within an individual case as well as across multiple related cases.

Case Study

ABC Bank is a major, multinational corporation that provides banking services to individuals and other companies throughout the United States, Canada, Central America and the Far East. The bank is faced with many different litigation and investigation issues in the regular course of business, and is called upon to provide discoverable material to federal investigative bodies as well as in private litigation matters several times each year. The bank is currently facing an SEC investigation regarding required disclosures, a related shareholder lawsuit alleging fraud and stock price manipulation, and an unrelated class action lawsuit fi led by customers claiming unlawful lending practices and equal rights claims.

Setup of the Evidence Management Repository. ABC Bank, after review and approval through an RFP process, determines that a vendor offering a fully functional evidence management repository is the ideal partner for its needs. The bank provides 3 terabytes of data to the vendor, who processes this set of data to remove “junk” fi les (system fi les or other irrelevant fi les identifi ed by fi le name, a hash value through a list validated by outside parties), deduplicates the documents, extracts the metadata from the documents, and indexes the document contents. The client receives a detailed report identifying all documents that are not processed, listing the reason (known or unknown) for the document’s exception. Once the processing has been done (either in batches or against the entire document set), the metadata is published to the repository database and the processed documents are stored in the document repository.

Setup of Review Cases. For the three matters facing them, the company has hired fourdifferent law fi rms. Two of these law fi rms will be reviewing documents in regard to the stockholder case, one of the fi rms will be reviewing documents for the class action litigation (using contract attorneys to do an initial review, followed by second-level review

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by fi rm attorneys), and one fi rm will be reviewing documents for disclosure to the SEC. Each of these matters is being overseen by one inside attorney, and all three matters are being overseen ultimately by the director of litigation for the bank.

In order to manage these matters, the client consults with the vendor and determines that the documents in the repository will be published into four different review cases, one for each law fi rm involved. Further, because the class action litigation is being handled initially by contract reviewers, an additional review case will be established for second-level review by the primary fi rm’s staff attorneys.

New Claims, New Case. The SEC investigation review takes two weeks, and 400,000 documents are found to be relevant. These documents are produced and delivered to the SEC, which fi nds only a technical violation, fi ning the corporation $250,000. This, in turn, triggers the shareholder case to add a new claim, in mid-review, stemming from this SEC violation. Because the review for discoverable materials has already been performed for the SEC investigation, the document set required for this new claim in the shareholder case can be quickly picked up from the SEC review. While it may need to have a high-level review run against it, to ensure that there are no documents that should not be disclosed in a civil action but were required to be disclosed to the SEC, the fact that the document set is already limited saves the client money and the law fi rm a signifi cant amount of time.

One year later, all of the cases originally established have been settled, and a merger has been started between ABC Bank and XYZ Bank, with ABC Bank intended to be dissolved in the process. This triggers an additional SEC investigation, as well as a new round of shareholder lawsuits. Over the course of the past year, ABC Bank has been

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Figure 2: Evidence Management Repository Structure for ABC Bank

DocumentRepository

(NAS)

Doc Set 3

Doc Set 2

Doc Set 1

WorkProduct

WorkProduct

WorkProduct

WorkProduct

ShareholderCase #1

ShareholderCase #2

Class ActionCase

(Contact Reviewers)

SEC Investigation

RepositoryDatabaseand Index

Doc Set 20

WorkProduct

Class ActionCase

(2ND Review)

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providing the vendor with additional data, keeping the repository as current as possible. When tasked with reviewing documents pertinent to these new matters, ABC Bank is able to quickly and easily utilize past work product done in any previous case to minimize the amount of time, effort, and cost in preparing for these new matters. Documents that were deemed previously irrelevant probably remain so, and the previously relevant documents need only a cursory review in order to determine whether they are relevant to the current matters. The only documents that truly need full review are those that have not been involved in previous matters, or documents that relate specifi cally to discovery requests not covered in prior matters.

Conclusion

There are many factors in play that make an evidence management repository a necessity for any large corporation facing high volumes of serial or document-intensive legal matters. When selecting a vendor for such an undertaking, the client should look for high-capacity processing, secure storage and review, and the ability to re-use prior work product in future or related cases. The primary goals of the evidence management repository are to process all potentially relevant documents a single time, to provide multiple views into these documents, based on the specifi c needs of the matter, and to allow the ability to re-use prior work product in future cases. A system that meets these needs will lower the cost to both the clients and their related law fi rms both in terms of effort, time, and bottom line.

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The Discovery Experts:

LexisNexis Discovery Services has the right consulting and technology choice for every discovery need. Top law fi rms, corporations and government agencies rely on the LexisNexis® products and services, Applied Discovery®, Concordance™, and Hosted FYI™, to meet their discovery obligations on time, accurately and cost-effectively. Services include records management consulting, data collection, forensics, media restoration, data fi ltering, data processing, review and document production in the format that each matter requires.

For more information or to contact the experts, please visit lexisnexis.com/discovery.


The information contained herein is not intended to provide legal or other professional advice. Applied Discovery encourages you to conduct thorough research on the subject of electronic discovery. LexisNexis and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under license. Applied Discovery is a registered trademark and Concordance and FYI are

trademarks of Applied Discovery, Inc. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. © 2007 Applied Discovery, Inc. All rights reserved. DS00114-0 0507

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