Analytics in eDiscovery can help you gain efficiency in your review and locate key documents more quickly so you are able to make informed case strategy decisions earlier in the case.
Note: This is the third part of a series about analytics in eDiscovery. Click here to read Part 1 on email threading and click here to read Part 2 on near-duplicate identification.
Relationship Analysis
Relationship analysis is an analytics tool used in eDiscovery review cases. The tool identifies who was taking to whom in your email data sets. But how can can relationship analysis help you in your matter?
This tool can be useful in finding email accounts you didn’t know about and determining whether you need to collect those accounts. It also can highlight individuals who are more important to a case than you realized – because you notice a large amount of communications between them and other key custodians, for example – alerting you that you may want to go back and collect from that custodian, as well.
Another use case of the relationship analysis tool is to use the timeline graph to see spikes in communication. This may highlight when communication was suddenly high between key custodians. Going in the opposite direction, it may also give you information by what is lacking. For example, if there is a very low level of emails during a time period when you expect there to have been a lot of communication, this could indicate emails missing or deleted from your data set.
Think about a mystery game in which the goal is to find who committed the crime. You often start by investigating the people, or persons of interest, and defining how they are connected. This tool helps you define how people were communicating; but the key to determining what the tool is showing is using your real-world intelligence. A good consultant can help walk you through the tool and how to interpret its results.
Concept Analysis
Concept analysis is often used in the early case assessment stage but can also be used after data is processed. This tool calculates concepts in your data sets in two ways: high-level concepts and sub concepts.
The tool can give you an idea of what kind of topics are included in your data set as well as show you special words in concepts that could potentially add to your keyword search list. Some clients use this tool to create assignments for reviewers, sending certain concepts to certain reviewers to help organize their review process.
If you’re interested in learning more about analytics tools or eDiscovery strategies, please contact us at info@ldmglobal.com