A Complex Second Request Comes Into Focus

1.1. MILLION DOCUMENTS ANALYZED, ORGANIZED, PRIORITIZED, REVIEWED, AND PRODUCED IN 75 DAYS.

During a merger, Lighthouse’s client received an HSR Second Request from the DOJ and had a short window to respond in defense of the transaction. The DOJ issued broad discovery requests requiring a fast technology-assisted review (TAR) to define the production and review corpus. In the face of this challenge, the client looked to Lighthouse’s Focus team, with its technology and review expertise, to leverage appropriate, strategic review and technology solutions and guide the process of responding to the DOJ’s requests.

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TAR AND ANALYTICS EXPERIENCE, EXPERT REVIEW GUIDANCE, AND PRIVILEGE CATEGORIZATION.

The Focus Discovery team guided the client through a TAR review with a quick turn, training the client’s experts and working in concert with the client and its outside counsel to deploy a defensible TAR process. Leveraging the Focus Discovery team’s substantive expertise helped the client cull down their initial review set by nearly 70% to a potential review data set of approximately 350,000 documents, after which the Focus Discovery team provided further reductions through the use of analysis and additional technology solutions.

A FOCUSED APPROACH

The Focus Discovery team went beyond providing technical expertise, and worked with the client to understand the subject matter and goals of the case, allowing the Focus Discovery team to provide more strategic review recommendations to the client, including the cutoff score for the potential review set. The Focus Discovery team served as the TAR expert for the client with the DOJ to ensure compliance with the requested process assurances, explanations, and documentation. After results were reported, the DOJ requested a unique validation of the TAR process at three levels of recall and precision. The Focus Discovery team leveraged its deep understanding of the TAR technology to work hand-in-hand with the client and counsel to provide statistical samples and guide the DOJ through the TAR validation process that ultimately resulted in total acceptance of the TAR by the DOJ.

Beyond the TAR process, the Focus Discovery team applied additional technology solutions and deeper analysis to further reduce and organize the review corpus. Analysis and sampling of documents within the review corpus that contained minimal text led to a review set reduction of approximately 150,000 records. An in-depth analysis of the client’s 1,000 privilege terms revealed several terms returning overly-broad results. Eliminating those terms reduced the privilege review set by an additional 40,000 records.

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TARGETED TECHNOLOGY AND EXPERTISE 

The Focus Discovery team’s technology expertise, recommendations, and experience with TAR and working with the DOJ gave the client the insights and solutions they needed to significantly reduce the amount of documents requiring eyes on review, and make informed, strategic case decisions. The collaborative approach to the TAR review between the Focus Discovery team, the client, and outside counsel created a smooth process of working with the DOJ to perform multiple validations of the results of the TAR review, and engendered trust in the process from the DOJ. Proactive statistical sampling of documents containing minimal text, combined with analysis of the clients’ privilege terms, eliminated nearly 200,000 records from either linear review or privilege review after TAR, allowing the client to strategically prioritize their review, and reduce the overall time spent on the review. With this significant reduction in the amount of documents for review, the client easily met the production deadline from the DOJ. 

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87% DATA REDUCTION, AND COMPLETE ACCEPTANCE OF PROCESS AND AN ON-TIME PRODUCTION TO THE DOJ. 

This matter demonstrates how Focus Discovery can facilitate business success. Here, the Focus Discovery team was able to facilitate a merger by meeting arduous discovery demands through technology and subject matter expertise. The Focus Discovery team’s guidance of the TAR ensured defensibility of the TAR process to the DOJ and early analysis of immaterial items eliminated 150,000 documents from review. Post TAR analysis of privilege terms resulted in additional reduction of documents for privilege review. Overall, the Focus Discovery team’s understanding of the case and the best available technology solutions reduced the client’s data set by 87%, saving the client and offered deeper insights into their data, and greater control over the entire process of responding to the DOJ’s requests.

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