Early Case Assessment

One of the most critical phases at the onset of litigation is the Early Case Assessment period. As a result of the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (especially its meet-and-confer requirements) law firm and corporate attorneys have an imperative to learn what information is contained in their data. Understanding the important issues involved is essential to determine the risks and merits within a particular case.

Previously, it was easy to identify and review critical documents at the onset of a matter. Today companies need to index gigabytes, and often terabytes, of data potentially containing hundreds of thousands of files. A manual review of this data is not only financially irresponsible but practically impossible. However, without the ability to understand the scope of discoverable information and drill into the important areas of a case, attorneys are essentially negotiating blind during 26(f) conferences and are thus at a significant disadvantage. Inference solves this problem by providing a practical and cost-effective solution.

Cull data to a manageable review dataset.
A critical challenge for attorneys is the ability to make informed decisions on eDiscovery requirements and strategy before ever seeing a single discovery document. Keyword filters, case issues and risk determination are often made in a vacuum since clients do not want to incur large processing and review fees unless absolutely necessary, and uploading a large dataset into a review tool is not only ineffective during the ECA period, but also cost prohibitive.

As the industry’s leading analytic review platform, Inference provides a myriad of dynamic clustering features, reporting analyses and concept searching capabilities to cull and filter data. The combination of these user driven features enables attorneys to prioritize data, conceptually search for critical documents, test keyword results, and cluster targeted areas to gain insight and methodically tag documents for responsiveness or removal from the system. By leveraging this capability, Inference helps clients to break the cost barrier and focus on the issues and merits of a case, rather than the expense.

Easily target critical areas and streamline review.
Utilizing Inference's Analytics Suite, attorneys can easily investigate issues, identify key documents and prioritize data for review from across the entire repository. By applying Inference’s various analytic features, reviewers can deploy a streamlined workflow that helps to highlight important data for priority review, or tag as non-responsive for removal from the system. 

Build custom analyses to guide investigation.
Don’t waste time reviewing irrelevant documents. By using Metrics, users can create customized reports and statistical analyses on any parameter in the repository, including Custodians, Domains, and Date Ranges, to determine areas that need more focus, identify patterns and trends, and create effective review workflow strategies.

Quickly identify critical themes.
Inference’s Concept Suggest feature enhances traditional searches by suggesting concepts to search for within your document population. This provides immediate insight into the document set without the need for in-depth familiarity of the contents. Users can opt to utilize Concept Suggest from the onset to recommend strategies and paths of review, or refine keyword searches based on issues found within the data.

Find relevant issues and documents from across the population.
Another important asset Inference provides to its clients is the ability to find similar documents and data from across an entire dataset. Inference’s Show Similar extracts the dominant concepts within a single document, or group of documents, and finds all similar records from across the entire population. Using this feature, a reviewer can quickly build sets of potentially relevant documentation without previous familiarity or understanding of what is in the data.