Last Man Standing

In January 2007, a cursory review of the paper documents and the electronic files yielded an estimate that 2.5 million pages of hard copy and 19 million electronic files would require reviewing.

Assuming that an attorney can review 50 documents per hour, the review would require 400,000 hours — one attorney reviewing for 200 years or 200 attorneys reviewing for one year.

Initial processing proposals predicted costs exceeding $300,000 to process 280 GBs of e-files and $780,000 to scan, OCR and code 600,000 documents. Start-up costs for the review were expected to be more than $1 million dollars, before one document was even reviewed.

To contain those costs and meet the 12-month review target, our litigation support department (www.bzresources.com) used ingenuity, and a mix of products from three major vendors.

First, we turned to the firm’s existing e-processing systems. Among our tools were Ipro Tech Inc.’s (www.iprotech.com) line of products, including Ipro e-Scan IT and Ipro OCR, and a full text search engine, dtSearch, from dtSearch Corp. (www.dtsearch.com).

We integrated those results with the data processed by our vendors ALC Legal Technologies (www.alcweb.com) and LDiscovery (www.ldiscovery.com).

Both ALC and LDiscovery also used Ipro eCapture to calculate MD5 Hash Algorithms (which yielded the same results as e-Scan IT), which allowed us to distribute e-processing across the three facilities and accurately identify and remove duplicate files across the entire collection.

We then determined that a hosted document review system was required. Many systems have successfully integrated features that can increase review workflow. After reviewing several systems, we selected iConect Development’s iConect.nxt (www.iConect.com). In addition to its complex foldering and search capabilities, we could easily export data and images to our LexisNexis Concordance (www.lexisnexis.com/concordance) database, which would later be used at trial.

(In previous years, native file review has been optional, but now, all major review tools include this option. Concept searching and integrated near duplicate detection within applications is swiftly becoming the norm.)

Using iConect also helped us maximize the results of our Ipro OCR processing, allowing us to highlight key words from our searches (making review of the text easier and faster). We were also able to easily overlay our DT Search Syntax into its search engine, resulting in faster and more accurate synonym and stem searches.

Two dedicated database analysts (Iglesia and Seo) supported the initial review. Key term searches were performed, and folders were populated for attorney review.

We then turned to the firm’s attorneys. All four of our firm’s associates and six contract attorneys participated in the review. We used staff attorneys to tag more than 32 issues, from identifying e-mails sent to and from competing companies, to tagging phone records of specific individuals, to identifying expense receipts and personal calendars — all essential to the defense of our client.

Initial document sampling reduced the total population for review to 1.5 million documents, and iConect’s ability to rank search results (which helped us prioritize reviewed documents) increased the review rate from 50 documents per hour to 125 documents per hour.

In the 11th month of our review, however, workflow reports indicated that 200,000 documents would not be reviewed on time. Faced with deadlines and cost requirements that could not be supported in the U.S., we enlisted the aid of a Philippine company. (BartkoZankel, saying that it is proprietary information, declines to name the company.) The Philippine team, which worked directly under the supervision of BartkoZankel’s litigation associates, recruited and trained 11 reviewers (J.D.s, attorneys and law students). The review was successfully completed on time and with a cost savings of 75% compared to a U.S-based review.

TRIAL PREPARATION
Under the direction of McLean and two senior trial attorneys, John Bartko and Robert Bunzel, field experts were gathered to assist in Swanson’s defense:

• Avi Stachenfeld of Visual Advocacy (www.visualadavocacy.com) created graphics for the opening and closing statements.
• Jury consultants Beth Bonora and Idgi D’Andrea (www.bonoradandrea.com) assisted with jury selection.
• Winston Krone, of Safir Rosetti (www.safirrosetti.com), an international security, investigations, intelligence consultancy, provided testimony on e-mail preservation.
• Transperfect Translations International Inc. (www.transperfect.com) provided testimony on the translation of Korean documents.

BZresources’ senior database analyst Runel Iglesia imported 1,200 “hot” documents from iConect into Concordance, along with 321 trial exhibits and 210 video clip depositions into Verdict System’s Sanction (www.sanction.com).

Throughout the three-week trial, Iglesia completed daily tasks that provided the trial attorneys immediate access to exhibits for use in cross-examination, including:

• Importing trial transcripts and real-time issue tags into Thomson West’s Livenote (www.livenote.com), which then could be sent to Sanction for display.
• Creating and displaying video clips in Sanction taken from the civil depositions.
• Searching the Concordance database for referenced images and sending them to Sanction for display.