Case Study
Gaming Industry Company Collects and Processes Data Only Once for All of its Matters, Using FTI Master Repository
Situation: A large gaming company faced multiple, ongoing matters involving vastly different issues and originating in numerous jurisdictions, yet the same key custodians were relevant to most of the cases.
Its legal team understood the excessive costs involved with recollecting and reprocessing the same information for each case and set out to find a solution that would enable the reuse of processed data.
The Solution
The gaming company turned to the Technology practice within FTI Consulting for help, due to FTI Technology’s experience developing master repositories and working across multiple legal review platforms. FTI Technology created a highly scalable master repository in the gaming company’s review software of choice.
With the master repository, the gaming company could collect and process its data only once, and then use that same data for different matters. The repository acted as a staging database for the raw data and saved the TIF and privilege coding done on each case. With each new matter, the legal team could migrate the relevant data to a new matter case book where legal review would take place. All coding decisions and metadata would be preserved and ported back to the master repository for potential re-use in future matters. In addition, when facing matters with overlapping issues, the legal team could re-use coding decisions, such as the privilege log, made on previous matters.
The master repository provided additional efficiency benefits when used with advanced analytics features within the legal review platform. As an example, the legal team conducted a search of key custodian data within the master database using search terms. The data was then migrated into a new case book for review. Using analytics, the legal team used the new case book documents to “find similar” materials in the master repository. They also conducted a sensitivity analysis, comparing the custodian list against the individuals CC’d and BCC’d on a high volume of the custodian emails. Through these two analytics methods the legal team identified three additional custodians that were critical to the case. Without analytics, these custodians would not have been found until later – impacting the legal team’s ability to understand the matter and effectively create case strategy.
Impact: Over $2 million saved by eliminating unnecessary duplication and review costs.
After collecting and processing over 3.5 terabytes of key custodial data only once, the gaming company estimated it saved over $2 million in e-discovery fees due to the master repository. Having relevant custodian data already collected and processed enabled the legal team to respond more quickly to matters and gain greater intelligence and control. In fact, the master repository enabled the gaming company to begin legal review within two days of receiving a new matter.