When the FTC decides to review a merger proposal and issues a Second Request, deadlines become critical. Even a few days delay on a merger proposal can mean the end of a billiondollar deal. Using Equivio's email-thread grouping, our partner was able to help its legal team meet a tough deadline and finish a review of more than 180,000 documents in thirty days.
The Problem
The client faced a 30-day deadline for collecting, reviewing and producing electronic documents for a second request response to the FTC for data pertaining to an ongoing antitrust investigation.
De-duplication, date limitations and full-text searching reduced the data set by 45%, but there were too many remaining documents for the review team to handle within the time allowed.
The Solution
After its initial efforts to trim the review population, our partner calculated that approximately 80% of the remaining document population consisted of e-mail messages and associated attachments. Because most people quote the prior message in their reply, email conversations contain significant redundant content. Though not exact duplicates, repeated review of this overlapping material consumes large amounts of review time without adding value. E-mail messages can also contain significant redundant data when the same attachment is routed to multiple individuals, with or without unique forwarding messages.
Equivio>EmailThreads allows you to group related messages and rank them in terms of percentage of overlapping content. It tags the most complete e-mail message, i.e., the one that contains all prior message content, as the "Inclusive" email for each thread.
Reading an Inclusive e-mail provides the full e-mail conversation in a single document, without the need to pull together content from multiple sources. After identifying the email threads and inclusives with Equivio, files were loaded into the system for review.
The Results
After removing system, executable, and other binary files from the review materials, the client faced review of approximately 359,000 documents in under 30 days. Global de-duplication, date range filtering, and search term queries cut this population in half, to about 187,000 documents.
Using Equivio>EmailThreads to limit the review population to the most inclusive e-mail message of each thread reduced the number of documents for first level review by an additional 60,000 documents, about one third of the remaining document population.
In addition, Equivio gave the team confidence that all messages (and attachments) related to a privileged communication had been identified and carefully screened before the production.
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