A recent study1 published by the Ediscovery Institute based on a survey of leading ediscovery providers (Deduping Survey) shows that, despite the technical ability to suppress or consolidate duplicates within an electronic document population, chances are about 50:50 that your outside counsel fails to take advantage of this technology, opting instead to doublebill for reviewing unnecessary duplicates for privilege, confidentiality and relevance. The study shows that, on average, law firms that do not consolidate duplicates across custodians are reviewing 27 percent more records than needed, and in some cases 60 percent or more, raising serious ethical issues involving conflicts of interest and technical competency.

Background on Duplicate Consolidation

The bulk of this article involves the extent to which law firms and companies may be failing to consolidate duplicate electronic records before engaging in document reviews. The idea is pretty simple: If one of your employees emails four other employees, that email may be found in the records of those five employees during discovery. In the ediscovery review world, there is no need to keep and review all five copies. There is technology available today that is able to:

• identify the fact that all five records are virtually identical; and
• consolidate the information about all five copies in the repository database fields, so that when reviewers are looking at a record, they can see who had copies of it and in what folders or directories those people kept their copies.

If duplicate records are not consolidated, multiple reviewers will look at exactly the same content to make exactly the same decisions. Not only does this duplicate review efforts, it wastes time. This is not double-billing by analogy; it is double-billing by definition.

The Deduping Survey asked leading ediscovery vendors in May 2009 to provide metrics on the results they obtained using different treatment options for addressing duplicate electronic documents. The results provided data points on the reductions in the volume of ediscovery requiring review, depending on whether the duplicate consolidation was performed only within the records of single custodians or across all custodians.

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Source: ediscoveryinstitute.org
By: Anne Kershaw, Patrick Oot, and Joe Howie

Read the full story originally posted by EDD Blog Online.