David Grant, a senior managing director at FTI Technology, recently contributed a two-part article to InsideCounsel on the issue of big email, and how corporate legal departments can address the many challenges that result from an e-discovery standpoint. In the article, David offers counsel an alternative to the standard comprehensive review process that is undertaken at the outset of most e-discovery matters. By leveraging the power of emerging analytics, counsel can find key facts up front, allowing a quick response to matters including intercepting illegal behaviors within the organization, addressing compliance violations, responding to whistleblowers and planning case strategy. With ever-increasing data volumes – and big email specifically – getting to the facts via traditional review is becoming excessively expensive and time consuming.

The articles outline how data mining and visualization technologies offer a paradigm shift for how legal teams can uncover key facts. These technologies can quickly and effectively reveal the small subset of critical data in a universe of hundreds of millions of emails, circumventing comprehensive review. This allows a quick response to matters, and the flexibility for counsel to go back and conduct a full review later on in a matter if necessary.

The new approach as offered in these articles provides the ability to summarize large volumes of data, exclude documents that are known to be irrelevant, reuse existing knowledge and grow the web of information about a particular matter. To read the full article, and the author’s tips for how to implement data mining and visualization as part of an overall e-discovery strategy, read part 1 of the article here, and part 2 here.