Every new technology concept introduced these days seems to have a nice, trendy marketing-bred name attached to it. And with this name it rides the standard wave of hype – from trade shows to aggressive sales to every technology developer racing to jump in on the fun. Think Social Media, Knowledge Management, etc… Early Case Assessment (or ECA) is certainly no exception. This is a term you’ve undoubtedly seen or heard thrown around in the legal and electronic discovery industry for some time now, and is maybe finally losing that initial hype-momentum as most providers have adopted the supporting technology and people have bought into the concept. You would hope that because of all this, it has been de-mystified, but in talking with potential users of this technology that does not appear to be the case at least in our local circles. So we want to try our best at helping you catch the ECA wave…
Think about electronic commerce websites. You go to BestBuy.com looking for a TV, and you immediately filter by type, size, brand, and price to get everything else out of the way. And even if you don’t know exactly what you want, you can easily test and search the available items to find what’s best for you. This is now fully possible with your electronic discovery, and probably more accessible than you would expect.
Early case assessment? Early data assessment? Early analysis? Huh? Electronic discovery and all that comes with it can be very expensive, and as you go through the stages outlined in the E-Discovery Reference Model you can understand why it would be beneficial of you to reduce the volume of data you are working with as best you can at each point. As we reduce volume, we hope to increase relevance and do so as efficiently as possible, especially as overall volumes of electronically stored information (ESI) are increasing rapidly within organizations. In the Dinosaur Ages of this industry, data was broadly collected, processed, converted to TIFF, and thrown into one giant bucket for attorneys to review document-by-document. Time would be wasted going through endless amounts of irrelevant documents and pure junk. We don’t need to tell you what this does to your costs and ability to budget properly.
We all get e-mail. Lots of it. Chances are most of it is not relevant to your case. Junk mail, newsletters, personal emails, office jokes. Now imagine as you undertake a case involving 10-15 custodians how much the sum of that irrelevant email may be. With two clicks you can eliminate any emails with the domain online.wsj.com from your review population. With two clicks you can go the other way and prioritize any emails from your client and to the opposing party for immediate review and analysis. The technology empowers you to perform extensive keyword search and analysis so that you can truly refine your terms and QC the results instantly. Don’t need PDF documents from custodian John Doe that he created in March of 2006? Easy enough to filter out even prior to processing and indexing through custodian, date, and document type filters. You can even browse through your document population based on common topics, popular email threads, and specific authors and senders.
Fortunately for everyone involved, the technology and the people who help you utilize technology have really advanced to break down some of the barriers of the processing “Black Box.” Keyword searching, technology, and strategies have helped group and cull documents prior to review. Metadata is being used more and more as a warmly welcomed ally. Native review capabilities have pushed aside TIFF conversion. ECA is really a cumulative evolution of these concepts and the technology that arms you with ease. It is all about taking steps and analysis early on during the discovery stages in order to aid in culling and sifting through your mountains of data, all while hopefully helping you formulate your case.