Ballard Spahr Eliminates More Than 80% of a Collection

How did they do it?

• Built a heat map in Analytics to see where documents overlapped with search terms and custodians
• Used the heat map to eliminate 2.5 million irreverent documents from review

Assisting a government agency in a contract dispute, Ballard Spahr received an overly broad collection of 2.8 million documents. The e-discovery team needed to eliminate most of the irrelevant documents during early case assessment, but traditional search and filter techniques resulted in too many irrelevant documents making it into review.

Using Analytics, they were able to build a heat map that showed where groupings of conceptually similar documents intersected with search terms, email domains, and key custodian metadata. Using the map, they eliminated large numbers of documents that had keyword hits, but were otherwise irrelevant—ultimately reducing the reviewable population to 277,180 documents.

“Analytics and visualizations in Relativity make our ECA process much more effective. The dashboards provide a quick, user-friendly view of our data, allowing us to act faster on the relevant issues.”
CAROLINE POLLARD, Manager of eDiscovery Services