Digital Forensics and eDiscovery case study: Leveraging TAR 2.0 in high-volume litigation

Our in-house Digital Forensics and eDiscovery team provides multi-jurisdictional litigation support and specialist expertise in forensic data collection and analysis, data investigations, in-house digital investigations, and electronic discovery (eDiscovery) services.

Challenges

In this recent case study, our legal team were faced with the daunting task of sifting through over 1,000,000 documents to identify those relevant to the case. Facing a tight deadline, our Digital Forensics and eDiscovery team had to come up with a solution as the traditional route – a time-consuming manual, linear review – was out of the question.

Solutions

Instead of throwing more bodies at the problem to perform manual review, our eDiscovery team implemented a TAR 2.0 (Technology Assisted Review) workflow.

Why this solution rather than linear review or a TAR 1.0 workflow? TAR 2.0 is a cutting-edge technology that incorporates Continuous Active Learning (CAL). It is a dynamic tool as it continuously learns from human-coded documents and proceeds to reprioritise the remaining documents in real time, with the most likely relevant documents coming to the forefront of the review pool.

In this instance, this left our legal team with the documents that were least likely to be relevant at the bottom of the document pool – eliminating the need to review them.

Results and impact

As members of our Litigation team started their review, the AI quickly started to surface documents that were most likely to be relevant to the case. Our lawyers would review a batch, make decisions as to their relevance, and within minutes the system would update the order of the document queue, ensuring that reviewers were always working on the documents that mattered most.

As the remainder of the document pool began to reach the likely irrelevant documents, a sample set confirmed that there were no more relevant documents left to be reviewed.

The results were staggering – only 300,000 documents needed to be reviewed, just 30 per cent of the entire document population.

The team was able to uncover the relevant documents with remarkable accuracy. What would have previously required months of linear review was accomplished in a fraction of the time. Additionally, instead of staffing a large team of reviewers, our legal team were able to meet their deadlines on the matter, while also saving time and cost for our client.

Key takeaways

This case demonstrates the collaboration between our eDiscovery and legal teams in implementing TAR 2.0, which allowed for millions of documents to be handled efficiently and rapidly, ensuring an effective outcome for our client.

TAR 2.0 was a gamechanger as it enabled the legal team to prepare their case effectively and meet tight deadlines without sacrificing quality or control.