Using a structured approach,
the volume of documents having
to be manually reviewed would be
significantly less. By structuring
and classifying documents before
they’re forwarded to legal counsel,
Stratify can help attorneys reduce
millions of documents to a much
smaller, more relevant subset. And
that subset can be reviewed more
quickly because conceptually similar documents would be grouped
and thus reviewed together. Studies have shown that an attorney
can review between 200 to 500
documents per hour, and up to
1,000 documents per hour in some cases, when they are
logically grouped by a common theme. That means they
can complete the review of the same volume of documents
75 percent to 85 percent faster. Furthermore, managers can
allocate groups of documents that are organized by Concept Folders to different review teams, assigning the most
relevant ones to the best and most expensive attorneys
in the firm. Less expensive junior attorneys, paralegals or
contract lawyers can handle the folders whose content is
deemed less important or less relevant to the litigation.
The flip side of cost is risk. Here, too, a structured
approach can have a significant impact. When relevant
documents are grouped together, the legal team can review
them in context with one another, increasing the accuracy
and consistency of how their content is judged. Reviewers
can swiftly examine content-duplicate and near-duplicate
documents, tagging them as privileged or responsive. Tape
backup copies can be culled from the reviewable stack
from the beginning. Near duplicates, including multiple
revisions of the same document, spreadsheets with minor
cell changes, and forwarded emails, can be grouped for
efficient and consistent review. Identical documents with
different metadata (content duplicates), such as copies that
are stored both on personal hard drives and a central file
server, can be examined more closely to determine who
knew what and when. This greatly lowers the risk of inadvertent production, which is difficult to claw back from
opposing counsel once it lands in their lap.
The Stratify software incorporates
elements of statistical analysis, pattern
recognition and linguistics analysis to
create a series of categorical “Concept
Folders,” and then creates the hierarchy
of the Concept Folders based on the
relationships between them.
Maps provide a visual diagram of
messages sent between senders,
receivers and intermediary correspondents. Attorneys can construct these maps on demand by
selecting senders and receivers
from automatically generated lists
of correspondents. For events like last year’s stock-option
back-dating scandal, Stratify’s analytic technology could
have uncovered the malfeasance even when the two parties
never communicated directly.
The underlying technology allows attorneys to analyze
relationships using chronology, message threads, concept
and work folders, tags and ranges of dates to identify critical messages for review. The Email Maps can be configured
to focus on different intermediaries and relationships, and
then highlight the message pathways between those individuals. This robust analysis capability makes it easy to
search a complex collection of emails and discover key
relationships that point to culpability or exonerate parties
under investigation. It’s the kind of intelligence attorneys
need to help their clients make informed decisions on
how to respond to subpoenas, what exposure and risks
are involved, and who might be responsible for possible
transgressions.
Finding the Smoking Gun in Forensic
Investigations
As an investigative tool, a solution such as Iron Mountain’s Stratify Visual Email Analytics™ can uncover
connections that might otherwise escape notice. It can
analyze the content of email messages as well as metadata
such as sender, receiver and dates, to create an intuitive Email Map of how all those people are connected—
directly and, perhaps more importantly, indirectly. Email
Putting an Intelligent Spin on Unstructured
Documents
The Stratify Legal Discovery service, which leverages many
of the advanced technologies we have discussed for managing unstructured information, runs as a service with
users accessing the database through a Web application
that facilitates workflow. But its value goes far beyond the
legal domain. Stratify’s solutions and technology bring a
semblance of order to an entire universe of unstructured
data, providing ways for us to more quickly synthesize,
correlate and distill it into actionable form, be it for litigation, competitive marketing, improving customer service or
other strategic purposes. The structure that Stratify helps
you to perceive in your unstructured information provides
the intelligence you need to forestall problems and capitalize on opportunities before someone else does. ▲
DEBBY YOUNG IS A TECH FREELANCE WRITER BASED IN
FRAMINGHAM, MA.
