More from Wortzman on Early Case Assessment

Susan Nickle and I have spent a busy week meeting with vendors and assessing litigation support tools on behalf of several clients.  The new built-in features to several of these tools allow organizations and law firms to conduct their own early case assessment in-house. This became the focus of many of the meetings we had this week.  This really ties into Nickle’s post last week with respect to in-sourcing and how much of the e-discovery process should be conducted in-house by large Canadian organizations.  As the tools are developing so rapidly, we see many ways for our clients to put themselves in a position to conduct early case assessment efficiently and in a very cost effective manner.

Despite an initial collection of hundreds of thousands of e-mails for review, early case assessment tools have allowed us to manipulate our searches and the data to cull the collections down to very manageable review sizes.  Coupling that with the review tools that allow for clustering, threading, boolean and other types of searches, we are identifying manageable review sets of data that can be triaged in a matter of days.  Trial counsels are then able conduct a serious assessment of their case.

​Susan and I  continue the quest to find the best tools to allow our clients to manage their e-discovery reviews, both in conjunction with external support and in-house.  The reaction from our clients has been overwhelmingly positive as they see the results of the early case assessment work