How one lawyer tackled 6.6 million documents - document management and e-discovery

Our client—a large energy company—was involved in litigation over an environmental matter. Only one lawyer was assigned to the case, overseen by one independent consultant—an especially small team, given the 778 GB of data collected for the case. In an effort to save costs, both sides agreed on a list of keywords to help identify relevant documents.

De-duplication culled the client's original count of 6.6 million documents down to 3 million documents. The list of keywords culled the document count significantly further, down to only 157,000 documents. However, with overly inclusive keywords like "environment" being used, it was evident there were still many non-responsive documents left in the collection to sort out—and that meant a lot of work remained for only one person to review.