Lighthouse Litigation Prep Proves Invaluable in Complex Litigation

Firms Needed Fast Analysis of 25M Documents

More than a dozen international law firms—including a Joint Defense Group (JDG) of 11 firms and several firms representing defendants outside the JDG—were engaged in a complex cluster of cases spanning over 30 US jurisdictions. The total document tranche included over 25M documents.

The firms needed to find and understand the key players, timelines, and nuances involved in each litigation, while also preparing for hundreds of depositions, witness interviews, hearings, and trials scheduled across the litigation universe. However, traditional approaches to fact-finding and litigation (i.e., document review, keyword searches, etc.) were drowning case teams in extraneous and duplicative information.

They came to Lighthouse looking for a strategic, unified approach to fact-finding, led by experts who could deliver the key documents, information, and details the case teams needed—and nothing more.

Custom Workflows Power Consistency, Speed, and Efficiency

Our experts started by creating a topic map across matters, which helped them quickly provide case teams with the core themes in each jurisdiction while reducing redundant search work. From there, as case strategy for each matter developed, the Lighthouse team drilled down into more nuanced fact-finding to help surface the documents case teams needed to learn the key details of each matter, through strategies like:

• State/Jurisdictional Overview Workflow – We used advanced search technology to target key documents in incoming productions and categorize them by jurisdiction, providing case teams with an immediate thematic overview of key facts and timelines.
• Re-Deployable Linguistic Model Workflow – Lighthouse linguists developed models based on intimate knowledge of the language used within the datasets, then deployed them within proprietary search technology to sort documents into tiers based on the likelihood that they contained key information.
• Deposition Kit Bundle Workflow – By bundling deposition kit requests from the same jurisdictions and departments together, we could search across smaller collections of documents and take a deponent-agnostic approach.
• Previously Delivered Name Hit Workflow – We provided case teams with documents from previously delivered results, giving them an advanced start on deposition preparation while further reducing duplicative searching.

These repeatable workflows significantly reduced the volume of searching and coordination required across matters and enabled Lighthouse experts to quickly zero-in on the exact documents needed—without wasting counsels’ time with redundant and unimportant documents.

Critical Docs Found and Delivered Across Dozens of Matters and Hundreds of Kits

Over the course of two years, Lighthouse experts prepared dozens of case teams for complex litigation and handled a deluge of competing deadlines, priorities, and ad hoc requests (totaling as many as 70 requests at a time).

For the Joint Defense Group, this meant:

• Over 1,150 deposition kits across 24 matters, encompassing 245K unique documents
• Over 100 state overviews across 21 different jurisdictions, encompassing 80K documents

For law firms representing individual defendants, Lighthouse provided an additional:

• 150 deposition kits, encompassing 13K documents
• 30 defensive overviews across 20 jurisdictions, encompassing 6K documents
• 1.3K documents in response to ad hoc requests and trial support

Each delivery was limited to essential information—including key themes and players in every jurisdiction, potential gaps in productions, lists of hot/sensitive documents and potential deponents, and key strategy documents—and avoided redundant and unimportant documents. The combination of innovative workflows and cutting-edge technology enabled Lighthouse to keep our team small and consistent throughout the engagement, so the entire effort was achieved by a handful of Lighthouse experts with institutional knowledge of every matter.

Since this engagement, we have used the same workflows for other clients facing complex Multidistrict Litigation (MDL)—making Lighthouse key document identification one of the most valuable and scalable litigation technology solutions on the market today.