Case Data Culling

Many organizations simply process all collected data and apply simple cull-down techniques (e.g., by date range, keywords, and hit counts). Because this cull-down step reduces data sets only by an average of 30% to 40%, organizations pay a tremendous price including steep fees paid to outside parties for processing and legal review. But with Clearwell, customers quickly and accurately cull-down large datasets by 80% to 90% and no longer need to send irrelevant data for processing and review, saving a considerable amount of time and money.

Lower Processing Costs

80-90 percent of the ESI collected for a case is non-relevant. Yet, enterprises continue to send the entire dataset to outside services for processing at an average cost of $1,800 per gigabyte, incurring significant costs. With the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform, customers quickly and accurately cull-down large case datasets to only the relevant ESI—typically between 10-20% of the originally collected data. As a result, Clearwell customers are significantly reducing their processing costs.

In a real-world example, the results from a Clearwell deployment at a Fortune 50 company show that a license of the Clearwell solution reduced processing costs (or legal service provider fees) by approximately $2.9 million in just 7 months, with a payback period of 3 months. The ROI from just 7 months of deployment was 553%.

Reduce Review Workload

Today, many corporations and law firms focus on reviewing case datasets faster. However, improving document review speed won’t help control review costs as effectively as significantly reducing the amount of documents needing review.

It’s not about reviewing faster. It’s about reviewing only what’s relevant.

In a real-world example, a manufacturing customer used the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform to investigate conversations between a set of employees and several outside entities. Using their existing procedures, the company first collected documents and PST files containing over 500,000 total documents. Once the case dataset was collected, Clearwell’s automatic de-duplication process immediately reduced the documents by 20%, to 400,000. Next, the customer quickly excluded attorney-client privileged documents which reduced the dataset to 360,000 messages. Then, the customer performed a multi-phrase keyword search and tagged the result of 250,000 documents into a responsive dataset. From here, the customer further filtered the responsive dataset to emails between five employees and two external client domains, significantly reducing the number of documents to 15,000.

Using Clearwell’s web-based interface, the customer evenly allocated the 15,000 documents to a team of remote reviewers for review. Using role-based security, the customer easily ensured that the reviewers only had visibility to their respective datasets. The end result: the customer reduced the data that needed to be reviewed by 97% (from 500,000 messages to 15,000 responsive messages) in less than one day.