Vedder Price Case Study
Executive Summary
A business-focused law firm with more than 300 lawyers, Vedder Price has offices across the globe. The organization, which prides itself on personalized services for its clients, focuses on corporate, labor, and employment law, alongside litigation across a range of sectors.
With a strategy around efficiency, Vedder Price already engaged Exigent on several preceding matters, including an eDiscovery document review project for an antitrust case which resulted in time savings of almost 50%. With another document-intensive review project and a database of more than 3 million documents, Vedder Price again sought Exigent’s support.
“As they have done a number of times for us in the past, Exigent did an outstanding job on this project. They are exactly the type eDiscovery partner we appreciate – professional, responsive, and efficient, with first-in-class quality work product. I cannot recommend Exigent and its team highly enough.”
Brian W. Ledebuhr, Shareholder, Vedder Price P.C.
After a comprehensive keyword search yielded potentially 500,000 documents for review, Vedder Price asked Exigent to deploy its eDiscovery analytics expertise and distilled the number of potentially responsive documents to 14,000.
This analysis not only resulted in a document review budget savings of 34%, but it also provided meaningful insights into the dataset and its usefulness for purposes of defending Vedder Price’s client.
Challenge
Defending a client in a matter involving more than twenty parties, Vedder Price applied a keyword search to a database with more than three million documents. This resulted in more than 500,000 unique‑hits, potentially responsive documents that may have required review for relevance to the plaintiffs’ claims and client’s defenses.
Having worked with Exigent previously, Vedder Price understood the value of having a partner with eDiscovery expertise that could quickly and accurately review these documents.
Solution
Following an in-depth discussion of the case, the plaintiffs’ claims and the client’s defenses, and per Exigent’s suggestion, Vedder Price agreed that, rather than having Exigent review the 500,000 documents resulting from the traditional keyword search, Exigent should leverage its advanced analytics to more accurately determine the number of potentially responsive documents.
Bespoke analytics would help to identify contextual patterns and concepts, thereby enabling Vedder Price to efficiently visualize the dataset from multiple contexts. Together with Vedder Price, Exigent mapped out success criteria, which was primarily to derive actionable insights from the data and to reduce the number of documents down to the most likely set of potentially responsive documents for review.
Employing NexLP’s StoryEngineTM, Exigent uploaded the three million documents’ metadata and text (as opposed to natives) into NexLP, ensuring a cost-effective analysis process. Exigent then examined the underlying facts and key terms related to the matter, plaintiffs’ claims and the client’s defenses, to identify the most relevant analysis entities, including relevant topics, communicators, places, organizations, and clusters.
Using these entities, Exigent identified the highly relevant dataset and relied on this set to create and train AI models that identified a larger dataset that was most likely and least likely relevant to each relevant fact to the claims and defenses in the case.
As a result of the AI training, Exigent identified approximately 14,000 documents that were likely, or most likely, relevant to the matter and which required a traditional document review. Exigent also conducted elusion testing to the least likely relevant dataset for purposes of validating the results.
During the analysis, Exigent maintained constant contact with the lead attorneys at Vedder Price, providing the with updates and quality control insights via detailed reports with visual supplements.
Results & Outcome
From an initial 3,000,000 documents and a potential review of 500,000 documents, Exigent was able to cull Vedder Price’s original request for a traditional document review to just 14,000 likely responsive documents. This saved Vedder Price’s client at least 34% on its expected costs for this particular document review.
And the benefits of working with Exigent extended to more than just cost savings.
Exigent compiled in-depth insights and analyses into the entire 3,000,000 dataset and its usefulness in defending the case. With a deeper understanding of the case, Exigent assisted Vedder Price in demonstrating the way by which the data the client’s defenses, thereby increasing the chances of a successful outcome for Vedder Price’s client.