Alignment and Savings Across a Dynamic Portfolio

A Lack of Coordination Drove High Costs and Complexity

Document review for a global biotech was expensive and inconsistent, due to a high frequency of litigations with often overlapping timelines and different outside counsel.

Lighthouse had been managing the company’s electronically stored information (ESI) for years, saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars through plans and policies introduced over time. After learning of our expertise in managed review, the company hired Lighthouse to bring order and efficiency to that domain as well.

Laying a Foundation with Standard Protocols

Our first order of business was to establish universal standards across matters, outside firms, and review vendors. These included:

• Upstream changes, such as data management protocols that made documents easier to search and sort.
• Overarching review protocols, such as QC process guidelines and specifications for production.
• Changes to specific tasks, such as refining privilege filters and standardizing coding layouts so review performance could be compared across different matters and teams.
  

A Lighthouse review manager trained all current firms and vendors and was on hand to monitor progress and answer questions, as well as onboard new firms and vendors as needed.

Increasing Efficiency Through Technology

Over time, Lighthouse gradually introduced accelerators to help increase efficiency and cost savings. Initially, this consisted of:

• Deduplication improvements, through strategies like single-instance review and normalized deduplication.
• Review accelerators such as privilege log automation and redaction automation.

To drive even more savings, Lighthouse led the company through a test-and-learn process for building workflows around advanced AI and other, more in-depth technology. The process involved trying out a new technology on a live matter, then conducting a post-mortem to clarify what worked and what could be improved. In this way, Lighthouse and the company developed a rubric for determining which workflows were the right fit for different matters.

Streamlined, Aligned, and Eager to Keep Innovating

In 5 years, Lighthouse transformed the company’s disconnected, manual, expensive approach to document review into a coordinated and robust program that boosts efficiency at every level.

For one recent matter—a patent litigation with a tight timeline overlapping the winter holidays—this review program drove extraordinary efficiency and savings. Tailoring the client playbook for the specific matter, the review manager designed a complex workflow that reduced eyes-on review:

• The initial dataset of almost 8M documents was reduced to a corpus of 388K through deduplication, culling, and removal of embedded and redundant documents.
• The population was further reduced through search hit only protocols and by employing a continuous active learning (CAL) model, stopping review when responsive documents became scarce.
• Finally, Lighthouse reunited document family members, automatically giving members tied to responsive documents the coding of their source docs.

In the end, Lighthouse:

• Reduced eyes-on review to just 92K documents (25% of the documents promoted to review)
• Saved the company an estimated $341,000 in review costs

Going forward, the company is ready to increase its use of technology, including classifiers built with advanced AI and an automated workflow for redactions of personally identifiable information (PII).