Top Reasons to Make Near-Duplicates a Mandatory Requirement

Contact: Warwick Sharp, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Equivio Inc.
(800) 851-1965 | info@equivio.com | www.equivio.com

Both in-house and outside counsel are becoming much involved in defining requirements from their electronic discovery providers.

INDUSTRY TRENDS

Increasingly, we see that the ability to group near-duplicates is becoming a standard baseline requirement in discovery RFPs.

Why is this happening? And why should you also consider making near-duplicate grouping a default requirement for your e-discovery supplier? Those are the questions that we will try to answer today.

First, some background — what are near-duplicates, and why group them? Near-duplicates are documents, or emails, that differ by a few words (or for long documents, even by a few paragraphs). Typical examples would be versions of contracts, product specs or form letters. In litigation review, lawyers like to read all the versions of a document together.

Near-duplicate products group together each set of near-duplicates. Normally, you can read just one of the documents in the group, then review the others by comparing differences.

TOP 5 REASONS FOR USING NEAR-DUPLICATES

Here are the 5 top reasons that near-duplicates grouping should be a mandatory requirement from your e-discovery vendor:

1. STAY COMPETITIVE

Your opponent is probably using near-duplicates. If you're not using near-duplicate groupings, you're at a technological disadvantage. Three years ago, when they first appeared on the market, near-duplicate grouping was a competitive differentiator. Now, NOT having near-duplicates on your side has become a competitive disadvantage. With players like the Department of Justice and Fortune 10 corporations adopting near-duplicate technology, near-duping has rapidly become a mainstream standard capability.

2. SAVE REVIEW COSTS

People are often surprised by just how many documents are near-duplicates. It's a chicken and the egg problem — in the absence of the solution, it's almost impossible to find the problem. In this case, you need software to find near-duplicates. Generally, in most enterprise collections, between 1 in 4 and 1 in 2 documents are near-duplicates. As a result, near-duplicate technology consistently reduces review and handling costs by 20 to 40%.

3. SAVE REVIEW TIME

Sometimes it's the time factor, rather than the cost factor is decisive. Faced by a tight deadline on a 10 million document case, a Fortune 100 company was able to reduce review time by over 25% by using near-duplicate groupings. Without near-duping, they would not have been able to meet the deadline.

4. TREAT SIMILAR DOCUMENTS CONSISTENTLY

By having the near-duplicates grouped together, the reviewer can apply a tag across the group. This ensures consistent preservation, coding and annotation of very similar documents. The reviewer may open up one of the documents in the near-duplicate group and decide it's responsive. The near-duplicate groupings allow the reviewer to bulk handle, marking all its near-duplicates as responsive. This is important in ensuring the quality of the production deliverable. You can also run a report which shows all near-duplicate groupings in which there has been inconsistent treatment (for example, a set in which some documents were marked as privileged, and others not; or some documents marked as responsive, and others not). This reduces the risk of potentially embarrassing and costly errors.

5. REDUCE RISK OF MISSING KEY DATA

The near-duplicate groupings allow you to focus on what's important — that is, on documents that contain unique information, and on the unique information within each document. This is what you are doing when you review with near-duplicate groupings, together with a compare tool. You are basically suppressing the redundant data and then focusing just on the unique data in each document. This gives you a much better chance of finding what you are looking for, and reduces the risk of missing the key information you need to make your case. Discovery review is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. Near-duplicate groupings reduce the size of the haystack.

DOWNLOAD A WHITE PAPER ON USING NEAR-DUPLICATES IN LITIGATION

Download our free white paper which explains how near-duplicates are used in litigation review.

Click to download. Select White Paper: Using Near-Duplicates: Applying Near-Duplicate Technology in Litigation Matters.

Warwick Sharp
Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
Equivio Inc.
5260-G Nicholson Lane
Suite 150
Kensington, MD 20895
(800) 851-1965
info@equivio.com
www.equivio.com

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