Advanced Search and Workflows Minimize Review and Reduce Costs in a Contract Dispute Matter

Search Terms Hit on Too Many Documents

A medical manufacturing company was entering arbitration with another business claiming breach of contract and other injuries. The company had to reduce more than a million documents to a manageable number for review and production, and conventional search terms hit on too many documents for attorneys to review quickly and affordably.

The company learned that keyword consultation from Lighthouse provides unique, linguistically driven search terms that are far more targeted than conventional terms and lists. They asked us to lead the search effort and help them save time and money on review.

Reducing Review Population by 40% to Meet Pre-Arbitration Deadline

The work proceeded in two phases.

Prior to arbitration, the company had to produce documents related to a specific plaintiff claim. We had less than a month for this phase, and conventional search terms had reduced the original scope of 120K documents by only 2%.

Our keyword consultation experts used advanced search strings to cull an additional 40%, leaving just 70K for review (including families). Of these, 22K were produced—on time and with full confidence that nothing was missed.

Satisfying Complex RFPs and Saving Time with Advanced Search  

In phase two, we helped the company answer all Requests for Production (RFPs) for the arbitration.

Counsel had used conventional search terms to reduce the starting set of 1M+ documents down to 235K, which our team further cut in half using advanced keyword queries. We then reduced the set even further with a unique “hits only” workflow that avoided pulling in an email’s attachments when only the root email hit on a search term. This limited the set to just 60K documents—a fourth the amount identified by the original search terms.

We also helped counsel accelerate review by precoding documents for the many issue codes involved in the RFPs. There were 60 codes in total—far more than the 5 to 15 expected in a matter like this—and coding each one manually would be extremely slow and expensive. By precoding the documents, we shifted the reviewers’ focus from identification to validation and enabled them to work much faster.

Accuracy and Efficiency Save the Company $485K

Across both phases, our advanced search strategies hit on 220K fewer documents than conventional search terms, saving an estimated $220K on first-level review and $265K on outside counsel.

Out of the 60K documents we reviewed in phase two, 44% were produced—illustrating how effectively our team targeted their searches and avoided bogging down reviewers with false positives.

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