Lighthouse Turns 2.1M Documents into Answers—Fast
Lighthouse combined IQ Answers with expert-led key document identification and keyword consulting to help a Top 10 U.S. law firm quickly uncover critical facts, reduce its review population by more than 78%, and avoid at least $420K in downstream costs.
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Documents Removed from Review
Review Expense Avoided
Annual Review Hosting Savings
The Challenge
One of the Top 10 largest law firms in the US needed to help their client quickly respond to a U.S. Department of Justice Civil Investigative Demand. The initial keyword searches returned 532K+ documents (with families) from a starting set of 2.1M+ documents—still far too large to review linearly on the government’s timeline. Counsel needed to shrink the set defensibly and reach the key facts fast to bring about a good result for the client
The Solution
IQ Answers
Fast Insights for the Legal Team
Lighthouse deployed IQ Answers, a retrieval-augmented, natural-language search tool, over ~406K documents, after removing non-inclusive email threads, junk files, document level duplicates (starting from a ~71K-document trial index on the two key custodians).
This allowed the team to ask plain-English questions and get answers grounded in the data—with citations, source notations, and highlighted excerpts, no cap on questions, and no pre-culling—so counsel was able to move from data to evidence in minutes/hours rather than weeks.
Expert Led Key Document Identification
The Facts That Mattered, Fast
Lighthouse’s expert search team of linguists and data scientists ran Key Document Identification across the three CID priority topics provided by counsel. Working outside the linear review flow, the team surfaced ~315 curated key documents and delivered them as a precise, clutter-free package—arming the team with easily consumed evidence to build the narrative and accelerating speed to knowledge.
Keyword Consulting
A Smaller, Defensible Review Set
Rather than accept the original term hits at face value, Lighthouse’s Keyword Consulting team analyzed and refined counsel’s searches, cutting the population from 532K to 114K documents (with families)—defensibly eliminating 420K documents, a 78%+ reduction. For an investment of just $4.5K, the work avoided at least $420K in downstream review expense (a conservative $1 per document) coupled with $45K annual hosting savings—roughly a 104x return, and more than the matter’s entire Lighthouse spend to date.
Hosting Savings
Fewer Documents Need to be Hosted in a Review Workspace
With the more focused search results, review hosting reductions amount to an estimated $45K annual savings.
