[author: Jacob Hesse]

Internal investigations and data analysis before litigation even begins can help companies and their legal teams reduce data collection and custodian interview costs, data storage costs, and help refine strategies if litigation does happen.

CloudNine helps clients leverage early case assessment approaches during internal investigations to assist with this process.  Reporting, such as an understanding of existing data types, who is speaking to whom over email, texts, and chats, and testing of potentially relevant terms and phrases can help teams understand the content of their data and formulate a strategy that saves time and money in terms of what must be hosted and reviewed later.

Data Inventory

Our clients often start by identifying the potentially important custodians, actors, and data sources under their control.  Who are the key decision makers?  Who is interfacing most with partners or clients?  Who should be interviewed to discover more?  CloudNine project managers can help clients plan and execute this process, including creating an inventory of what data each custodian has, where it is, and determining what will be needed to preserve, collect, and potentially review it.

Sampling, Searching, Categorizing

As data is identified, CloudNine clients can test key words and phrases against it to find potentially relevant content.  This is helpful when litigation has not yet started, and no search terms have been agreed upon.  The client can find information about the nature of a possible case early, allowing additional time to formulate a strategy.  During this time of investigation, data can be sampled as well, giving a peek into the nature and content of the data without needing a full and expensive document review.  Data can be categorized by period, by source, and by potential relevance.  This categorization can help streamline review later by organizing the data so that most likely relevant portions are handled first.

Reducing Cost

One of the major advantages of Early Case Assessment (ECA) is reducing costs during litigation, especially in data hosting and document review.  By understanding the data early, clients can be more intentional about what gets processed for hosting, review, and production.  Rather than throw all data into a hosted platform and reviewing most or all of it, a much smaller subset of data can result from the ECA process:  “noise” in the form of duplicative, not-relevant, and other out-of-scope data can be eliminated.