Catalyst search professionals guide judge and litigants to common ground
A major CERCLA environmental lawsuit had become stuck in the sludge of an e-discovery stand-off. On one side was the former owner of a now-demolished manufacturing plant. On the other was the developer that purchased materials from the plant, only to find they were contaminated. At issue were the sufficiency of the developer's response to the manufacturer's discovery requests and the adequacy of its search for responsive documents. On a motion to compel, the impasse was to be heard by a federal district judge.
The manufacturer contended that our client, the developer, improperly performed its review of some 104 GB of data, resulting in its underproduction of responsive documents. Lawyers for the manufacturer demanded that our client conduct an entirely new round of searches, review and production, using search terms it supplied. Our client needed to find a way to get around the impasse without breaking the bank.
To the search professionals at Catalyst Consulting, it was readily apparent that the searches proposed by the opposing party were far too broad and would result in an unduly large and expensive set of documents to review. Complicating the matter and adding to the potential expense was that our client's data was originally processed by a vendor that was now defunct.
As an alternative, we proposed a two-phased approach. First, we would conduct sampling to gauge the adequacy of the original searches. Only if sampling demonstrated the original searches to have been flawed would we proceed to the second phase, in which we would reprocess the entire set of data.
When opposing counsel continued to object, Catalyst consultants and statisticians became directly involved in negotiations between opposing counsel and in conferences with the federal judge. We explained the efficacy of our proposed method and the undue expense of the opponent's proposed method. Only when the opposing party agreed to pay the cost of a full second search did the judge accede to their request.
Catalyst Consulting proved instrumental in helping the judge and the litigants find a common path around this impasse. Our final challenge was to reprocess and load the original data and conduct the new set of searches. Using all the search terms and in all the combinations proposed by opposing counsel, this resulted in nearly 4,000 separate searches.
As document populations increase, clients and counsel are increasingly turning to repository companies that provide enhanced technology needed for the legal process along with the expertise to put it to use. The Catalyst Consulting team includes certified search experts with many years of experience in dealing with complex searching, including privilege searching, workflow and QC. That's one of the many Catalyst advantages.