Significant Cost Savings Achieved Through Lighthouse Spectra

What They Needed

Faced with yet another third-party subpoena, a large pharmaceutical company started to question how they could address these types of matters in a more cost-effective manner. Although sometimes larger in terms of data volume, these types of matters aren’t generally complex and commonly don’t require the expertise and oversight of an outside vendor to manage the eDiscovery process.

This case, in particular, had a large data volume with a low dollar value, so the company wanted to explore options outside of the traditional vendor and outside counsel review and production process.

How They Did It

Lighthouse had been exploring the idea of Spectra, our cloud-based, user-driven eDiscovery solution, with this client for some time and this third-party subpoena seemed to be the perfect fit for their first run. Although the matter was a bit larger in nature, with over 150 GBs of email, it could easily be self-driven by the client’s in-house team of experts within the Spectra environment.

To begin, the Spectra team onboarded the client’s team into the tool and provided training, documentation, and access. From there, the client kicked off the matter and uploaded all the documents into Nuix to be processed with the click of a button. Nuix then quickly processed this data and loaded the resulting documents into Relativity for review. Upon investigation of the resulting ~750K document set, the client decided that instead of taking the time to craft and test search terms to identify the potentially relevant files, they preferred to engage Lighthouse’s Focus Discovery team to further reduce and refine the files needing to be reviewed. As a first step, all documents were run through Brainspace to flag lesser included emails that could be removed from the review. Out of the 771,825 documents loaded to Relativity, 168,628 (or 22% of the population), were able to be removed from the review entirely.

Next, the client sent Lighthouse’s Focus Discovery team a request for production as well as the subpoena to aid in the search term creation and optimization process. The Focus group worked with the client to create and then optimize the search terms until only ~5,000 hits (0.6% of promoted docs) were flagged for review. At this point, the client team was able to organize the review and review the documents to ensure privilege was considered. Finally, the ~250 relevant documents were produced inside of Spectra and delivered for service to the other side.

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The Results 

Overall, the client was not only able to save significant money on linear review due to a reduced data volume, but also on the traditional review process, as they did not have to outsource it and instead could run their matter in one easy-to-use solution, while accessing on-demand expertise of the Focus Discovery team. 

The experience thus far has been overwhelmingly positive and the client now has an easy-to-use, self-service solution for handling third-party subpoenas (and other similar matters) in a more cost-effective manner. 

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