For a leading, global technology company, a flood of IP litigation threatened to drown it in e-discovery data. Sued first by one competitor, then another, the company retained Catalyst for e-discovery search and review. Soon after, another competitor sued and then another, until, in short order, the company found itself embroiled in dozens of lawsuits and anticipating even more.
As the number of lawsuits swelled, so did the quantity of data. Cumulatively, the cases involved tens of millions of documents and surpassed 20 terabytes of data. One case, alone, had 6.5 million electronic documents. To meet the demands of multiple discovery deadlines, the company and its legal team scurried to collect and load all this data as quickly as they could. But the sheer quantity of the data threatened to cause bottlenecks that would slow the entire process to an unacceptable pace.
With multiple, complex lawsuits creating massive mountains of data, the company could see trouble looming ahead. Facing a series of litigation deadlines and not wanting its legal teams delayed in their reviews, the company needed a way to open the floodgates in loading and indexing. At the same time, with so much of its data being spread across different sites for different cases, the company wanted a way to standardize and automate privilege and confidentiality searches, so that screening would be consistent and reliable across all its uploads.
Even as the company feared data bottlenecks, Catalyst already had the system it needed to open the flow. Catalyst’s Fast Track® automatically processes native files and loads them into the Catalyst CR review platform. Using Fast Track, all the company had to do was place its data on the Catalyst FTP site. Loading would begin automatically and immediately. Depending on the size of the file, loading could be complete within minutes.
For the company, a top priority was to maintain the security of its data in order to protect the confidentiality of its IP. With Fast Track, the company was able to use special encryption software to lock down each bundle of data before sending it to Catalyst. A separate process delivered the decryption key to Catalyst. As Fast Track began to process the data from the FTP site, it automatically unlocked it and loaded it into CR.
Just as maintaining data security was a top concern for the company, so was maintaining privilege and confidentiality. Using Catalyst CR’s powerful search features, the company was able to create an automated process to search across all of its data for privileged and confidential documents. The company worked with the Catalyst Search & Analytics Consulting team to develop and refine a comprehensive set of search terms. Against each batch of uploaded documents, over 8,500 searches were run automatically to screen out those that were privileged or confidential. So large was the quantity of data that searches sometimes ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Simply keeping the search terms current was itself an ongoing process, as names and products changed over time.
Having automated its privilege search, a second step was to automate the tagging of results. Using Catalyst CR, the company set up the process so that documents identified as privileged were automatically tagged and the specific search hits were saved in data fields. That made it easy for reviewing attorneys to identify privileged documents and see why the system marked them as such.
By using Catalyst’s Fast Track and PowerSearch, the company was able to open the floodgates on a tsunami of e-discovery data. These tools provided a highly automated process capable of handling the company’s huge volumes without fear of bottlenecks or delays. As soon as the company placed data on the FTP site, it was rapidly decrypted and loaded, often in just minutes. Once the data was loaded, the privilege search kicked in automatically. If multiple uploads were underway, the system was smart enough to know when the upload was over and the search could begin.
Global companies face legal challenges from all corners of the world. When a major company is involved in multiple legal matters, it needs to find ways to streamline its e-discovery processes without sacrificing quality and security. Catalyst’s cloud-based grid provides companies with the power and automation to drive the process. Catalyst Consulting adds the know-how to harness that power to fit a company’s search needs. That’s the Catalyst Advantage.