E-DISCOVERY - EARLY CASE ASSESSMENT

Early Case Assessment

Leading corporations such as DuPont have proven that the practice of Early Case Assessment (ECA) improves litigation success while reducing cost nearly 30%. What has kept early case assessment practice out of the reach of many has been the lack of easy to use but powerful analysis capability. To be useful for ECA analysis must be sophisticated, automated and applied efficiently to a large data set at the onset of a litigation matter.  The MetaLINCS Content Analysis technology is the perfect solution for this need. MetaLINCS technology fully indexes your data within minutes and creates an analytic model that automatically categorizes data in to more than 25 categories including custodian, concepts, dates, foreign languages, currencies, senders, receivers and many more. It is quick and easy to verify your custodian assumptions, develop key word and other search criteria for the “Meet and Confer” session and even create witness lists.

The outcome of the Meet and Confer session will certainly influence the total E-Discovery costs and often the final outcome of the case. Early case assessment also puts inside and outside counsel together as a tight team at the very beginning of a case. Within the first few weeks, in-house and outside counsel investigate the allegations, identify the type of discovery needed, interview key witnesses, and determine the strengths and weaknesses of the case. Outside counsel provides an evaluation of the opposing counsel’s case, evaluates relevant law and decisions, and formulates a detailed discovery budget. At the end of this two-to-three month process, counsel is prepared to form a litigation strategy. With an early case assessment in-hand, counsel is better able to determine whether to pursue settlement or to take the case to trial. Essentially, successful ECA gives counsel the needed information to create a cost -benefit analysis that suggests how best to resolve the case.

Move past simple keyword search to Analysis-Powered Early Case Assessment
Concepts and Concept Clusters
Email Threads
Social Network Analysis
Extracted Entities
Rapid identification of key case topics, people, vocabulary, and documents along with automated culling of irrelevant information.