Flex Discovery Solutions Case Study: Consultative Approach to E-discovery Project with Back-up Tapes

Background

An international construction company abruptly ceases operation in certain states. Several contracts are left unfulfilled. The client is tasked with determining the cause of the shutdown and assessing the overall business damages incurred on entities holding outstanding contracts.

The Problem

The client was presented with 8 DLT Tapes Containing Approximately 450 Gigabytes of information from a point in time system wide backup. The backup contained Lotus Notes mailboxes and complete fileservers for accounting, sales and human resource departments. Due to the fact that the law firm was not familiar with the contents of the tapes, they initially submitted a keyword list that was extremely broad and would have returned “responsive” data at an estimated 85% of the total population.

The Common Solution

The most common way to deal with this project is to initially restore the entire tape collection. The cost for this process ranges from $200 to $700 per tape. After the data is restored, ESI processing is required for the entire population. In normal “data in/data out” scenarios, the data is ingested into conversion systems at or around $200 per source gigabyte. The potential cost for this phase after deduplication is around $75,000. Utilizing the initial, overly inclusive keyword list would have returned approximately 325 responsive gigabytes for processing into the client’s final database format. At the common cost of $450 per final processed “data out” gigabyte, this portion could easily have cost the client an additional $146,000.00. The total for the common solutions could have easily surpassed $220,000 and yielded a 325 gigabyte database, or 800,000 documents for review.

The Flex Solution:

Instead of the process recommended by other vendors, Flex consultants proposed an alternative processing path. Instead of starting the ESI conversion process after restoring the 8 tapes, entire 450 gigabytes, Flex utilized existing technology to index the entire tape set. At this point the client was able to perform high level searches on the entire document collection that numbered near 1 million documents. After a week of searching and analyzing this data, the client was able to narrow down the final responsive set to about 105 gigabytes, or 250,000 documents. This data was processed and load files were created for 2 separate review packages.

This alternative process saved our client approximately 75% of the estimated cost incurred utilizing the “common” approach. The Flex Solution also allowed for additional substantial cost savings on the document review phase of the project by yielding approximately 500,000 fewer documents for teams to review.

The timeline for completion of this project was 30 days.

Final Cost Comparison

Common Solution: $220,000 plus review of 800,000 documents
Flex Solutions: $ 50,000 plus review of 250,000 documents

The Flex Difference

This case study is one of many instances that illustrate the Flex Difference. We are not only another E-discovery vendor. We consult with our clients to identify their needs on a case by case basis and present them with solutions that yield predictive and controlled costs while providing all the information critical to proving and winning the case at hand.

For more information and specific references on this case study, Please contact Damon Sparks at dsparks@flexdiscovery.com