Getting to what’s real as soon as possible is one of the best ways to save money in e-discovery. Targeted collections let inside counsel reduce hosting charges, attorney review and production costs by identifying the most important data before collection begins.
Real targeted collections combine talent and tools to reduce the amount of data that needs to be reviewed for production. A good targeted collection plan will:
Identify the key custodians who have responsive data
Interview those custodians to find where the data is stored
Involve the custodians in creating and testing search terms to find responsive documents and data
The Targeted Collection v. the “Data Grab”
Making full forensic images of all custodians’ hard drives—and sometimes even email servers—is a common approach to managing document collections in e-discovery. Parties that use this method collect a large volume of data, knowing up front that some of it is non-responsive. They then use search terms and other e-discovery filters to limit the responsive data set.
But collections that just rely on the use of e-discovery tools and search terms to create the data set for use during attorney review and production may have problems and could be extremely costly.
Collecting everything off hard drives and servers increases attorney review and production costs. It also increases the chance of accidental production of privileged information or documents not related to the litigation. And it leaves parties open to possible claims of document dumping during production.
Many of the problems have to do with the limitations of a search-word-only approach to document collection. Search terms are not an exact science and can be over-broad or too restrictive. They cannot be relied on to find the same documents that an employee could easily identify as likely responsive during a targeted collection.
Running keyword searches also requires some level of processing or outside software. This adds immediate additional costs to “run” the search terms against what is probably a very large data set.
Finally, most people try to avoid missing documents and end-up being over-inclusive during the search term cull—and the bigger data set that results again means more costs for attorney review.
Targeted collections can solve many of these potential problems and greatly reduce costs. By limiting the size of the data set from the beginning, targeted collections save money by requiring less attorney review time.
