CASE STUDY A Language-Based Analytics Case Study Identifying Potentially Privileged Documents Challenge An international insurance client involved in a reinsurance matter needed to identify all potentially privileged material as quickly and cost effectively as possible out of millions of documents. The client’s traditional approach to identifying potentially privileged documents, by using only simple keywords and metadata, had historically resulted in the unnecessary and costly review of too many non-privileged documents. This was especially the case when the client included words like “privileged” and “confidential” in its keyword list. In addition, many potentially privileged documents had previously been overlooked during review because they were not, per se, communications between the company and its attorneys even though they contained complex privileged content. Approach The client had developed a list of metadata criteria and keywords that they believed would identify potentially privileged documents, but neither list could be used in a standalone manner. The keyword list included words that typically appeared in all email footers the company sent or received. The challenge was to limit the keyword search to just the text contained in the body of the document. To accomplish that, RenewData made an inventory of the footers and treated the language used in each footer as a Logical Expression (LEX). We then indexed the documents in the collection, but excluded the aforementioned LEXs from the index. As a result, the search engine couldn’t “see” the language of the LEX. Thus, a search for the word “privilege” considered only the language contained in the body of the document and not the language contained in its disclaimer footer. The second half of the problem was more complicated. Occasionally the company’s attorneys would send a privileged communication via email to one of the company’s executives. The executive would then write a new email to staff that effectively included the privileged language of the first email, but without referencing the attorneys. The privileged language was often complex and the emails to staff were not picked-up by the standard privilege metadata criteria. Capturing these privileged emails had proved an insurmountable problem for the client. To solve the problem, RenewData put all documents deemed potentially privileged based on metadata into its Vestigate review platform. As these documents were reviewed, the attorneys highlighted the exact language in each document that created the privilege. Vestigate’s Automatic Query Builder grabbed this highlighted language and transformed it into Boolean queries that were run against the entire population of documents. In this manner, documents and emails that contained the attorney’s privileged language, but did not have the attorney metadata, were identified and held back from production. Outcome By employing these two techniques, the client was able to rapidly identify documents containing privilege-related terms contained only in the body of the emails, thereby vastly reducing the volume of false positives. In addition, the client was able to identify documents containing complex privileged language that had not been sent to or from the company’s counsel. The entire privilege review was completed by one attorney over the course of two days -- a fraction of the time otherwise required with a traditional approach. www.renewdata.com 888- 811-3789 [email protected] Copyright © 2013 Renew Data Corp. All Rights Reserved.
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