The original production was a couple hundred thousand documents; however, our client was focused on a smaller data set of just over 3k that were not reviewable by traditional means. The client was unable to view the files but needed to look at the documents to review them, so the request was to determine whether that specific set of docs were audio, image, or other files accessible through Relativity or any other means for review. The plan of attack was left up to our team of experts.
Though the request itself was nothing out of the ordinary, the parameters surrounding the request left our clients at a disadvantage. The discovery deadline was approaching on Monday, which was 3 days away, and 3k documents was estimated to take at least 75+ hours of review time. On top of that, the request came in during the weekend and would potentially require an overtime rate at the expense of our clients. With the project approved by the clients, our Fusion team jumped in.
Looking at our clients’ best interests, it made the most sense to review the docs within the Relativity platform to save time since the documents had already been loaded. Once the Fusion Team had the chance to look at the documents and analyze the best approach, they realized that perhaps the tech team could help streamline the data by working their magic with the file types.
The thought was that by sorting the filetypes it could help organize the files to open outside or with Relativity plug ins. It would also help give team members consistent file types to open. Fusion reached out to the PM team and our analysts jumped right in. As soon as they started to categorize the files one of the PLUS Senior Project Analysts realized that majority of the documents were corrupt. His years of experience and knowledge were key in providing the support needed and he quickly was able to analyze that the data itself was bad by looking at some key indicators. The source of the issue stemmed from a bad forensic job by the opposing, nevertheless, deciding how to move forward was in the hands of PLUS.
Our team decided to try to run some of the documents through Irfan View to see if the documents would open, which would determine if the files were corrupt or not. The documents errored out, meaning they couldn’t be read through conventional means. After an hour, it was determined that 2k image files within the document set were also corrupt. This helped bring the data set down to 700 documents that the PLUS Fusion team was able to turn around in just a few hours. Ultimately, our team culled down the data by 75%, saving the client time and money in review costs.
The PLUS ecosystem allowed this project to be as successful as it was. The expertise of our PM and Analyst team working alongside our Fusion team prompted innovated thinking that helped save our clients time when it was of the essence.
