Catalyst CR Helps Client Review 1.2 Terabytes of Data and Respond to FTC Second Request in 6 Weeks

One of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies had a definitive agreement to acquire another company. The only remaining hurdle to completing the deal was approval from the Federal Trade Commission, which had issued a second request for documents.

Complying with this request meant collecting data from over 100 custodians from a variety of systems, including Unix sendmail and hard drives running Linux, Windows and HFS (Apple's file system). File types included PSTs, mbox and a wide assortment of loose documents, ranging from 1 KB to 1.8 GB in size. By the time all relevant data was collected, over 4.6 million documents, totaling 1.2 terabytes of data in more than 25 languages, had to be reviewed for production. In addition, the client was on a tight timeline and a budget.

The Solution

The company tackled the problem by assembling a team comprised of an Am Law 100 law firm, a leading discovery consultancy, and Catalyst Repository Systems. Working together, the team employed a five-step approach to complete the review rapidly and efficiently.

Data Inventory

The collected data was shipped to Catalyst on hard drives and DVDs. Catalyst promptly entered the data into the chain of custody process, which included a full inventory of the data received and creating a comprehensive record for control purposes.

Processing

Next, the data was processed using Catalyst's proprietary tool set. In addition to extracting metadata, the processing stage included filtering data to extract unreviewable file types and to remove duplicate documents by custodian. Control numbers were applied to all documents in their native formats.

Culling

After processing, the data was culled using key-term searches. The searches were up to 450 terms in size and included key words, date ranges, custodians, etc. These searches enabled the data to be divided into two categories.

The first category was data that could be produced to the FTC with no further review. By the end of the culling process, this category included almost 3,000,000 documents comprising more than 750 gigabytes of data. In all, 64% of the documents collected ended up being produced with no human review. The cost of reviewing this data would have exceeded $1,000,000 if highly aggressive tactics were employed and would have approached $3,000,000 using more typical review tactics.

The second category included documents that contained potentially sensitive or privileged information. These documents were organized into folders for linear review in Catalyst CR.

Linear Review

Even though 64% of the data was able to be produced straight out of the culling process, the team still had over half a terabyte of data to review under a tight timeframe. To meet the timeline for production, the team employed more than 90 legal professionals to review the documents in native format, eliminating the time and expense of converting them to PDF or TIFF. Catalyst CR rapidly streamed an html preview of the documents and enabled reviewers to access the original version of the document with the click of a button where further analysis was required.

To make the review as efficient and rapid as possible, the team used Catalyst CR to organize the data around common characteristics and assigned logical batches of data to each review team. This enabled reviewers to become familiar with specific themes and, where possible, to use Catalyst CR 's bulk tagging capabilities to code multiple documents at once. Reviewers used Catalyst CR's redaction tool to remove privileged materials and Catalyst CR produced audit trails for each reviewer to ensure review quality.

This approach to the linear review process enabled the review team to quickly organize the documents into folders of materials to be produced and folders of materials to be retained. It also yielded a comprehensive privilege log.

Production

To save time and expense, the team devised a novel production strategy with the FTC. Rather than converting documents to TIFF or PDF and producing them in paper or on media, the parties agreed that the company would produce documents to the FTC in native format on a second extranet site on . This enabled nearly instantaneous production upon completion of the review, and allowed the company to avoid the cost of converting documents into a different format, which would have exceeded $800,000 at prevailing market rates. Producing documents on another CR site also gave the FTC the means to conduct its review promptly and efficiently, underscoring the company's cooperation throughout the merger review process.

The Results

By working with an expert team leveraging Catalyst's technologies, the company achieved its objectives of meeting the aggressive timelines of the second review process and cutting review costs dramatically. Over 64% of all documents collected were produced with no individual human review, saving the company between $1,000,000 and $3,000,000 in review costs. By reviewing documents in their native format and producing them on a companion Catalyst CR site, the company saved an additional $800,000 in conversion costs. While less quantifiable, this approach also earned important goodwill from the FTC.

Based on the findings of this review, the FTC agreed not to challenge the acquisition. The deal was completed at a purchase price of more than $9,000,000.

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1. A total of 2,944,000 documents were produced without review. Assuming a highly aggressive sustained review rate of 250 documents per reviewer per hour, it would have taken almost 12,000 hours to review these documents. At an average hourly rate of $100 per reviewer, the cost of this review would approach $1,200,000. Using a more typical review rate of 100 documents per reviewer per hour the cost of the review would approach $3,000,000.

2. Approximately 4,200,000 documents were produced. Assuming an average document size of 4 pages and a conversion price of $.05 per page, the total cost of converstion would be $840,000.