Early Case Assessment

CaseCentral Early Case Assessment Datasheet

Once a company reasonably anticipates a lawsuit, it has a duty to preserve all relevant data related to the suit. Companies go through an exercise to identify, collect and preserve relevant data before beginning review and production. However, not every event or lawsuit progresses to the “review” phase of the cycle; many are disposed of prior to full-scale review commencing. It is estimated that between 40-80% of all documents collected are not included in the full-scale review phase.

Why? Because the review and production phase is the single most expensive component of a litigation lifecycle. So where do companies put collected/relevant data prior to the full-scale review and production phase? Many simply dump collected ESI on an internal file share and use an excel spreadsheet to track the collection information manually. But, given the volumes of data required for cases today, this approach can increase risk, expense and error.

And such data has huge value early in discovery, prior to review, in assessing a case’s merits, potential liabilities, data volumes and associated costs. CaseCentral Early Case Assessment addresses these needs online, eliminating IT's needs to build out infrastructure and solving legal’s need for access. Attorneys can evaluate strategies, perform analysis, evaluate keywords and eliminate irrelevant data.  And if a case goes forward, attorneys can quickly perform first pass review and move the subset into active review in one of CaseCentral’s review platforms.

Identifying What is Relevant

In addition CaseCentral Early Case Assessment includes:

Accessible Data drives key capabilities integral to efficient case management, even before review has begun:

• Investigate merits of case
• Assess risk by analyzing data
• Estimate costs for full discovery

Actionable Environment allows for counsel to identify relevant data and reduce volumes:

• Evaluate keywords with fully indexed data to identify relevancy
• Cull by date and custodian
• Classify documents by potential treatment (aka: potentially privilege)

Outsourced Low-Cost Storage for preserved data through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model simplifies administration and eliminates capital cost.  General counsel can act quickly, often independent of IT, to identify, collect and preserve data in an actionable environment.  And risk is reduced, as backup and recovery for all data is applied universally by professionals trained in dealing with discovery.

Common Architecture with the CaseCentral review platforms, means moving documents from early analysis to active review is simple and quick.  Search terms refined in ECA are applied identically in review, and can even be further refined, if it is discovered that a certain term has very low responsiveness.

When clients choose CaseCentral Early Case Assessment in conjunction with a CaseCentral review platform, they choose a truly integrated approach to Preservation, Review and Production.

Minimize review costs and data sets, maximize review efficiency and re-use