Estimating & Managing Risk in E-Discovery Projects
Making the decision to settle a litigation matter is often not about “if” but “when.” Early Case Assessment (ECA) technology allows case teams to work together to determine the risk and strategic plan for reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) relevant to the litigation matter. As a litigation support project manager, how do you explain the value of ECA to your case team?
According to a recent article by Oliver Silva,
“ECA allows litigation support professionals, paralegals, and attorneys to gain greater insight into their document collections by interacting with the data prior to review. By implementing an e-discovery strategy utilizing ECA,case teams no longer need to use their best guess for relevant search terms. They become active participants in the search and culling process, which can be extremely advantageous when formulating effective search terms. Add to that arsenal the ability to apply advanced filters such as searching for “SPAM”, categorically excluding emails from an HR distribution list or seeing statistics of a document’s relevancy percentage — all completed within minutes. Thousands of false hits or irrelevant documents can be discarded from the review in a few mouse clicks. “Litigation Support Project Managers can add ECA to their tool kit of options for their case teams. Silva outlines the value proposition for considering ECA in his article but here are a couple of the key points:
- Formulating Search Terms vs. Negotiated Search Terms
- Documented and Defensible Search Methodology
Does your standard e-discovery project management workflow include early case assessment technology? What are some of the key concepts in explaining the value of this option that you normally share with your case teams?
