ellwood Evidence supports a lot of firms in their document review process. Getting the materials ready for the lawyer's eyes and their brains.

Our eDiscovery support process leads to the moment we hand it off to the lawyers and then we pick it up again when they are finished and have identified their production documents, and their key documents.

Recently my work put me in that middle ground.

Most of my own time is spend doing investigations. I work with digital evidence in the form of digital artifacts like event logs, web browsing history and emails. Lots of the work is timeline-driven - what happened and when.

Recently I was asked by a client to review a collection of over 8,000 documents (scans of paper emails, scans of policy manuals, contracts, contract change orders and alike). My goal was to determine if the opposing party every made something known to our clients (among other things).

Stephanie Williams, our Director of eDiscovery, and our team processed the documents into a form I would work with. Everything was generally PDF files or TIF files. They ran an optical character recognition (OCR) process over the files so I could search for keywords.

All of this got placed into our EDT online review database.

I sat down to do the part of the process normally reserved for our law firm clients - review the documents and find the evidence (or lack of it I suppose).

I am blessed in many ways. I am an expert at search and the use of Boolean terminology, and what I don't know my team does in spades. I was quickly able to identify the documents that held content I need to review. Excellent!

Need me to produce a list of all the documents where the opposing party noted a "deficiency" before 2010? No problem. How about 'complaint' or words that are 'like' complaint, sure no sweat.

But is the list of documents enough? Now what should I do with them? Well in my investigative world I would reference the paragraph, sentence or phrase that was exactly the statement that demonstrated some point. The 'smoking gun' around deficiencies - for example when Betty emails Mark and says "Gee Mark, we are really happy that there wasn't a single deficiency in the delivery, thanks a lot!".

Trouble is this killer sentence from Betty was on page 26 of a 28 page document - it was an email thread of back and forths that started months before and ended months later.

I needed this statement on a timeline with the date and time it was stated - I needed the FACT not the 28 page document in my notes.

EDT is an excellent review tool. World class and world beating. We also use iPro and Relativity and they too are great. So I went to my team and said - "right I have this problem…"

They talked about creating a note on the document referring me to page 26. They talked about cutting and pasting the relevant passage into a One Note or Word document and noting the document ID and page number.

Yuck!

It was slow and disjointed. I hated it.

But that's state of the art in review platforms. That's what you do. That's how it works. Its way better then Post-It notes - yes I accept that but…

So I had Stephanie take the documents that hit on my keywords and export just those 700 or so into CaseMap. Yes CaseMap. Is this a CaseMap commercial - nope. It’s a sanity commercial.

Using CaseMap I ran my keyword searches so the hits would be highlighted within the documents. I then through up a review set of all 700 documents and flipped from hit to hit.

When I found Betty's email to Mark, I dragged my mouse over it and selected the text. When I lifted my finger from the mouse CaseMap popped up a box, it copied the text into the box and let me add stuff. What did I add? The time and date of the email, the author of the statement, Betty, the recipient of the statement, Mark. The issues that this statement spoke to - it turned out there were several. I also created a follow up question for Derrick in my office to find an answer to about this statement.

And I was on my way again.

Hit after hit, some irrelevant, but some were gold.

When I was done I turned to the 'facts' I had extracted and sorted them my issue. The first issue was supported by 12 facts. The next by 6, the next issue by another 10. One of the facts showed up on two of the 5 issues I was considering.

And so on and so on.

It was fast, it was efficient, it was flexible.

How are my law firm clients managing without CaseMap? Well, a document review platform *is* better than Post-It notes….

At the start of the process you need search, you need filters, you need to cut out the irrelevant and the chaff. Document review platforms are terrific for that - you can't live without them if you have more than 1,000 documents in your case.

But once you get down to the relevant documents, get them OUT of your review platform and into a thinking platform.

We look forward to helping you increase the efficiency of your practice.

Paradigm Shift: Review to Analysis