e-Discovery Software Connects the Dots for Case Processing at Fenwick & West

To stay competitive in the rapidly evolving legal industry, more and more firms are turning to technology to dramatically cut costs and time associated with traditionally human tasks. Couple the need for better, more efficient technology with the recession, and the need for law firms to implement e-discovery software platforms for more efficient business becomes crucial.

However, Fenwick & West was ahead of this current trend. As early as 2001, the firm's legal team understood the power that e-discovery offered to its business ' logging immense cost and time savings. Since that time, the firm has continually upgraded its e-discovery capabilities by replacing incompatible products that lengthened case processing through multiple, sequential translations.

With more than 300 attorneys in offices spanning Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle and Boise, ID, Fenwick & West is a national law firm with many clients that are aggressive technology innovators. In 2002, I was brought onto the team as Fenwick's Practice Support & Database Manager to find IT technologies and strategies that would ease the workload so the firm could run more efficiently. The firm was in the middle of one of the biggest pieces of civil litigation outside of the government ' a suit that included upwards of 120 million pages.

Moving Data

Shortly thereafter, we recognized some specific IT pain points. We had a number of software applications that together covered the entire e-discovery process. Our challenge was getting the data from A to B to C to D.

The potential solution would have to be cost-effective while providing an end-to-end platform that leveraged the power of Fenwick & West's in-house servers. The sensitive nature of client data ' especially for Fenwick & West ' meant that data would have to reside on-premise for maximum security and accessibility. This wasn't a point of contention ' although some e-discovery platforms our team evaluated seemed to think it was.

Our process to build a unified e-discovery platform involved presentations from many different vendors. Most said they could achieve end-to-end, in-house e-discovery for us ' but the reality was they couldn't. In nearly every case, they wanted us to give up data to their servers at some point in the process. We wanted our clients' data to remain on our servers at all times.

Some of the products Fenwick & West CTO Matt Kesner and I evaluated seemed to do the job, but to cover such comprehensive territory, these products turned out to be fatally cost-prohibitive.

Perhaps most importantly, scalability played an enormous role in the decision process. Our firm takes on cases involving much larger data sets than are typical. While some firms were only dealing with megabytes of data at the time, we were sifting through gigabytes and even hundreds of terabytes. More than anything, we needed a product that was scalable and would give us the leg up we needed for our unique clientele.

Viewpoint e-Discovery Fits Fenwick & West's Needs

Fenwick & West's IT team eventually evaluated Viewpoint e-Discovery software from Lateral Data. We selected Viewpoint e-Discovery, offered as a licensed solution, because it features major components of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (“EDRM”) spectrum, including collection and preservation of data, pre-processing, full processing, analysis, review and production.

Now available in version 4.5, Viewpoint not only covers the major components of the EDRM spectrum, but also offers a host of powerful and unique e-discovery capabilities, including early case assessment features, complex analytics, e-mail threading, visual conceptual analysis and near-duplicate comparisons. The application, which features an Outlook-style interface familiar to even non-technical users, simplifies an organization's overall investment in time, training, cost and IT resources.

The sheer volume of files Kesner had to deal with on the native side caused some fairly major performance and display problems for other products, many of which tended not to focus on the native review. The ultimate goal was to get the data from the computer to the attorneys in a way that preserved the native files, making the process both logical and defensible in court. We cobbled together a number of software tools to accomplish these tasks. However, we still had to deal with importing data into and out of these various tools, taking time and personnel resources to accomplish. Viewpoint was the first product we saw that accomplished all of the major e-discovery related tasks, allowing us to greatly reduce the number of tools needed.

One of the things we like best about Viewpoint is that it maintains both native formats and parent/child relationships. Viewpoint can examine anything you can view with the human eye ' e-mails, charts, spreadsheets, photos ' without converting them to TIFFs or other digital common denominators, saving a lot of processing and review time. And because parent/child relationships are preserved, attorneys know where files came from. e-Mail attachments, for example, are linked to their parent e-mails.

Since the inception of the Viewpoint e-Discovery platform, we have been able to add features to keep up with the market in terms of general searching, advanced de-duplication and concept searching. The IT team has been impressed with each iteration of Viewpoint as each version continues to provide advanced features that are very beneficial to the attorneys. For instance, newer Viewpoint e-Discovery updates provide a full Unicode system, so foreign language files are processed the same way as ASCII files. As a firm with international clients, this has been a huge advantage for us.

A number of Fenwick & West cases involve data in non-English languages. This brought Unicode compliance to the forefront. Because of the solution's capabilities, the firm was able to process English, Chinese, Hebrew and Russian language data simultaneously for a faster and broader picture, without the discovery of missing chunks of information as they've witnessed some colleagues experience.

A clear-cut example of the role Viewpoint e-Discovery would come to play in speedy case processing came shortly after implementing the platform. A case involving a federal investigation required extensive production on a very short timetable. Between a skilled legal team, a cooperative client and the power of Viewpoint, we were able to produce results more quickly than many of the other companies under investigation. Our client did not incur the ire of the investigators or undergo a follow-up request ' but other companies did.

Large Case Processing in a Matter of Days

While some vendors claim weeks or months to process cases from collection to review, Viewpoint e-Discovery gets the job done in a matter of days. The implementation of Viewpoint helped eliminate a dozen or so interspersed, costly software platforms and added new capabilities for legal and support teams ' capabilities that eventually led to the Fenwick & West team using the software for 80%-85% of all litigation matters.

We're always under pressure to get results to our attorneys and clients. Compared to our previous e-discovery solutions, Viewpoint allows us to process information three to five times faster. With the volume of data growing exponentially ' we currently have over 100 terabytes of data hosted by Viewpoint ' speed is incredibly important. There's no question, Viewpoint is a fundamental tool for us.

Lateral Data's support team has proven to be an extremely effective and timely resource for the firm. As one of the company's earliest customers, Fenwick & West has worked alongside the Lateral Data support and technical teams to improve the product. Lateral Data is one of the few vendors we would call a partner ' not because we have a signed agreement, but because the relationship has been honorable and fruitful for everyone involved.

While Fenwick & West can't quantify the exact cost savings, we believe it is significant. In the long run, Viewpoint may end up saving our clients millions of dollars.

The elimination of niche solutions and middleware wasn't the only cost savings. In fact, Viewpoint helped free up IT resources in a big way. Internally, lawyers are working more efficiently ' and thanking the IT team for the help. Finally, it is difficult to say any client in litigation can be “happy,” but our clients have been very pleased with the results our firm is able to provide.

To stay competitive in the rapidly evolving legal industry, more and more firms are turning to technology to dramatically cut costs and time associated with traditionally human tasks. Couple the need for better, more efficient technology with the recession, and the need for law firms to implement e-discovery software platforms for more efficient business becomes crucial.

However, Fenwick & West was ahead of this current trend. As early as 2001, the firm's legal team understood the power that e-discovery offered to its business ' logging immense cost and time savings. Since that time, the firm has continually upgraded its e-discovery capabilities by replacing incompatible products that lengthened case processing through multiple, sequential translations.

With more than 300 attorneys in offices spanning Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle and Boise, ID, Fenwick & West is a national law firm with many clients that are aggressive technology innovators. In 2002, I was brought onto the team as Fenwick's Practice Support & Database Manager to find IT technologies and strategies that would ease the workload so the firm could run more efficiently. The firm was in the middle of one of the biggest pieces of civil litigation outside of the government ' a suit that included upwards of 120 million pages.

Moving Data

Shortly thereafter, we recognized some specific IT pain points. We had a number of software applications that together covered the entire e-discovery process. Our challenge was getting the data from A to B to C to D.

The potential solution would have to be cost-effective while providing an end-to-end platform that leveraged the power of Fenwick & West's in-house servers. The sensitive nature of client data ' especially for Fenwick & West ' meant that data would have to reside on-premise for maximum security and accessibility. This wasn't a point of contention ' although some e-discovery platforms our team evaluated seemed to think it was.

Our process to build a unified e-discovery platform involved presentations from many different vendors. Most said they could achieve end-to-end, in-house e-discovery for us ' but the reality was they couldn't. In nearly every case, they wanted us to give up data to their servers at some point in the process. We wanted our clients' data to remain on our servers at all times.

Some of the products Fenwick & West CTO Matt Kesner and I evaluated seemed to do the job, but to cover such comprehensive territory, these products turned out to be fatally cost-prohibitive.

Perhaps most importantly, scalability played an enormous role in the decision process. Our firm takes on cases involving much larger data sets than are typical. While some firms were only dealing with megabytes of data at the time, we were sifting through gigabytes and even hundreds of terabytes. More than anything, we needed a product that was scalable and would give us the leg up we needed for our unique clientele.

Viewpoint e-Discovery Fits Fenwick & West's Needs

Fenwick & West's IT team eventually evaluated Viewpoint e-Discovery software from Lateral Data. We selected Viewpoint e-Discovery, offered as a licensed solution, because it features major components of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (“EDRM”) spectrum, including collection and preservation of data, pre-processing, full processing, analysis, review and production.

Now available in version 4.5, Viewpoint not only covers the major components of the EDRM spectrum, but also offers a host of powerful and unique e-discovery capabilities, including early case assessment features, complex analytics, e-mail threading, visual conceptual analysis and near-duplicate comparisons. The application, which features an Outlook-style interface familiar to even non-technical users, simplifies an organization's overall investment in time, training, cost and IT resources.

The sheer volume of files Kesner had to deal with on the native side caused some fairly major performance and display problems for other products, many of which tended not to focus on the native review. The ultimate goal was to get the data from the computer to the attorneys in a way that preserved the native files, making the process both logical and defensible in court. We cobbled together a number of software tools to accomplish these tasks. However, we still had to deal with importing data into and out of these various tools, taking time and personnel resources to accomplish. Viewpoint was the first product we saw that accomplished all of the major e-discovery related tasks, allowing us to greatly reduce the number of tools needed.

One of the things we like best about Viewpoint is that it maintains both native formats and parent/child relationships. Viewpoint can examine anything you can view with the human eye ' e-mails, charts, spreadsheets, photos ' without converting them to TIFFs or other digital common denominators, saving a lot of processing and review time. And because parent/child relationships are preserved, attorneys know where files came from. e-Mail attachments, for example, are linked to their parent e-mails.

Since the inception of the Viewpoint e-Discovery platform, we have been able to add features to keep up with the market in terms of general searching, advanced de-duplication and concept searching. The IT team has been impressed with each iteration of Viewpoint as each version continues to provide advanced features that are very beneficial to the attorneys. For instance, newer Viewpoint e-Discovery updates provide a full Unicode system, so foreign language files are processed the same way as ASCII files. As a firm with international clients, this has been a huge advantage for us.

A number of Fenwick & West cases involve data in non-English languages. This brought Unicode compliance to the forefront. Because of the solution's capabilities, the firm was able to process English, Chinese, Hebrew and Russian language data simultaneously for a faster and broader picture, without the discovery of missing chunks of information as they've witnessed some colleagues experience.

A clear-cut example of the role Viewpoint e-Discovery would come to play in speedy case processing came shortly after implementing the platform. A case involving a federal investigation required extensive production on a very short timetable. Between a skilled legal team, a cooperative client and the power of Viewpoint, we were able to produce results more quickly than many of the other companies under investigation. Our client did not incur the ire of the investigators or undergo a follow-up request ' but other companies did.

Large Case Processing in a Matter of Days

While some vendors claim weeks or months to process cases from collection to review, Viewpoint e-Discovery gets the job done in a matter of days. The implementation of Viewpoint helped eliminate a dozen or so interspersed, costly software platforms and added new capabilities for legal and support teams ' capabilities that eventually led to the Fenwick & West team using the software for 80%-85% of all litigation matters.

We're always under pressure to get results to our attorneys and clients. Compared to our previous e-discovery solutions, Viewpoint allows us to process information three to five times faster. With the volume of data growing exponentially ' we currently have over 100 terabytes of data hosted by Viewpoint ' speed is incredibly important. There's no question, Viewpoint is a fundamental tool for us.

Lateral Data's support team has proven to be an extremely effective and timely resource for the firm. As one of the company's earliest customers, Fenwick & West has worked alongside the Lateral Data support and technical teams to improve the product. Lateral Data is one of the few vendors we would call a partner ' not because we have a signed agreement, but because the relationship has been honorable and fruitful for everyone involved.

While Fenwick & West can't quantify the exact cost savings, we believe it is significant. In the long run, Viewpoint may end up saving our clients millions of dollars.

The elimination of niche solutions and middleware wasn't the only cost savings. In fact, Viewpoint helped free up IT resources in a big way. Internally, lawyers are working more efficiently ' and thanking the IT team for the help. Finally, it is difficult to say any client in litigation can be “happy,” but our clients have been very pleased with the results our firm is able to provide.