Herbert Smith Freehills Reviews 40 Million Documents Using Assisted Review

How did they do it?

• Used Analytics to narrow the data set to 3 million documents for review
• Assisted Review helped reduce the review set to approximately 172,000 documents
• In total, reduced review fees and times by 60 percent

An energy company involved in a contractual dispute approached global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills for assistance with legal proceedings. HSF’s ALT team knew applying analytics was crucial to getting the job done, considering the project’s scope and timeline.

ALT employs an “analytics by default” approach to each case. “Assisted Review and Analytics are integral to that process,” according to Arjuna Guruge, who leads HSF’s eDiscovery team in Australia and Asia.

“By bringing technology, and specifically Relativity, into the fold, our team members find highly sensitive materials quicker, push as little as needed into review, and save our clients crucial time and money,” Arjuna said.

Putting their Analytics Process in Motion

Kicking off the case, HSF worked closely with their client on the initial collection of documents—including sourcing data from document management systems, network shares, email systems, local computer user drives and a large number of project servers. At the outset, the document set that required processing was around 40 million documents.

“Evidence collection throughout this case was a huge undertaking for us,” Arjuna said. “We needed a way to start filtering and categorizing documents immediately so we wouldn’t get buried.”

By applying various filtering techniques early on, including de-duplication, high-level keyword searches, email threading, and folder path and file type analysis, the team significantly narrowed down the document set and ended up pushing only 3 million documents to the initial review phase—or just 7 percent of the original data set.

After further consultations with HSF legal teams, ALT combined refined keywords and Analytics concept clusters to reduce the document review pool to 565,142 documents within a few days.

Bringing it Full Circle with Assisted Review

Next steps entailed launching a sample-based learning project with Assisted Review to begin training the system on finding relevant documents.

“We begin using Assisted Review and Analytics from the inception of each case. We start off with small sets of documents to help verify document selection for seed sets,” Arjuna explained.

HSF ALT conducted one-on-one training sessions with the legal team and used specialized verification techniques throughout the project and during manual review. This approach proved effective—the team powered through reviewing nearly 600,000 documents, categorizing the relevant and eliminating the irrelevant ones. HSF ALT review teams conducted a manual review of a mere 172,611 documents at the end the Assisted Review project. “Without Analytics and Assisted Review, we would have been drowning in millions of documents.” Arjuna said.

Ultimately, the HSF ALT team truncated review fees, and time, by 60 percent on the project.

The results reinforce the team’s “analytics by default” mentality and role as a law firm leader in Analytics usage in the region on cases large and small.

“In one case with less than 200,000 documents we saw a reduction of over 90 percent,” Arjuna said. “Applying Analytics on every case is a huge differentiator for us in the marketplace.”

HSF’s ALT director in Australia, Hilary Goodier, echoed Arjuna’s comments.

“Law firms throughout the world are constantly pressured by tight timelines and increasing data volumes,” Hilary explained. “It is incumbent on firms to be actively looking for ways to automate and streamline the entire e-discovery process—at HSF, we are proud to be leading this effort on behalf of our clients, whether they’re located in the Asia Pacific region, or elsewhere throughout the world.”

“Law firms throughout the world are constantly pressured by tight timelines and increasing data volumes. It is incumbent on firms to be actively looking for ways to automate and streamline the entire e-discovery process—at HSF, we are proud to be leading this effort on behalf of our clients, whether they’re located in the Asia Pacific region, or elsewhere throughout the world.”