Early Case Assessment

In this “big data” age, the sheer amount of information collected in the context of litigation and investigations continues to proliferate at incredible velocity. “Early Case Assessment” (ECA) is essential to the eDiscovery process as it allows for the implementation of advanced data culling technologies so your team can quickly identify only the most responsive information for your matter. The appropriate utilization of these technologies routinely decreases the total size of data volumes by up to 75%, which then allows for your team to reduce their overall legal spend and meet more aggressive discovery timeframes.

Our team are experts in the ECA process and our various technologies allow for our customers to gain quick visibility into their information and make critical data culling decisions prior to engaging in substantive document review:

  • Search Term Reports: Our team utilizes the best of breed indexing technology “dtSearch” in order to identify all of the terms, phrases or expressions across your matter’s global text index. Our search indexes also support more advanced searching operators such as stemming (grammatical variations of a root word), wildcard (substituting any combinations of letters in a particular word with a root expander), or proximity searching (finding any document that has a word within a particular number of words of another word). The end product is a user friendly search terms report that can be quickly reviewed and modified at a moment’s notice.
  • Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Filters: The identification, review and removal of PII from client information is essential to the discovery process. We offer what are referred to as “regular expression” filters to identify sequences of credit card information, social security numbers and other forms of PII so outside counsel can make informed decisions on how to appropriately handle this information.
  • Domain Name Filtering: Our ECA technologies also allows for the global extraction of email domain information so certain sender or recipient domains, such as spam email or personal correspondence, can be identified and isolated from the responsive information for your matter.
  • Date Range and File Type Filtering: Some matters employ date and file type restrictions for responsive information. Our technologies allow for the easy searching across various metadata fields that allow for outside counsel to quickly identify only the responsive information from their matter which will require review.