The Problem: Exploding Information Volumes and Spiraling Litigation Costs
Litigating organizations are challenged by ballooning document volumes and skyrocketing costs. The organizations involved in litigation -- from corporations to law firms and government -- are searching for ways to cope with the document surge.
Equivio's Solution: Eliminating Data Redundancy
Equivio offers technologies which identify relevant documents, groups near-duplicate documents and captures email threads. Equivio is used in the following stages of the e-discovery process:
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Culling: In today's e-discovery environment, the most widely-used culling technique is keyword matching. Research studies show that keyword search techniques typically retrieve 20-30% of the relevant data. Equivio>Relevance consistently retrieves 80-95% of the relevant data. The ability of Equivio>Relevance to distinguish between relevant and non-relevant documents means that, in total, fewer documents need to be reviewed manually, but 3 to 4 times the number of relevant documents are retrieved.
- Review:
- First-pass review: Equivio>Relevance is widely used as a replacement for first-pass review. Equivio>Relevance consistently achieves the same or better accuracy than first-pass human review, but in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
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Prioritized review: The Equivio>Relevance scores are used to prioritize the review, starting with the most relevant documents, and then working back in declining order of relevance. This accelerates access to the key data - in many cases, the top 10-20% of the documents may contain 80-90% of the relevant documents. Not only does this accelerate the development of the case, it also enables stratified review to reduce costs - the initial phase of the review can Involve more senior staff, with more junior staff or contract reviewers conducting the latter phases of the review.
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Review by groupings: Rather than linear review, document-by-document, Equivio enables groups of similar documents and emails to be reviewed together. Equivio's near-duplicate and email thread groupings enable a more efficient and consistent review process.
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Quality assurance: The Equivio groupings serve a quality assurance function by verifying consistency of treatment. For example, following the completion of review, prior to production, Equivio allows the identification of near-duplicate sets in which there has been inconsistent treatment on responsive or privileged tags. Similarly, discrepancies between the relevance designations set by Equivio and the human review team can be flagged and submitted for quality assurance.
This eliminates redundancy in the document review process, significantly reducing the number of documents that need to be reviewed. The result: litigators can zoom in on the information they need to build and win a case, while driving significant cost savings.
When reviewing near-duplicate documents, the Equivio technology enables the user to pinpoint each document's unique, value-added content. When reviewing emails, Equivio allows users to focus exclusively on emails that contain unique content.
The Benefits
Proven in cases with the Department of Justice, leading law firms and major corporations, the Equivio technology helps win litigation by allowing you to focus on what's important -- by pinpointing the documents that need to be processed, identifying those documents that contain unique information, and highlighting the unique information within each document. Benefits include:
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Enhanced findability of data. By allowing the virtual suppression of redundant data, Equivio helps users cut directly to the information they need. The focus on unique data enhances data findability, and reduces the risk of missing critical information. | 
