How a leading petrochemical company streamlined its legal strategy during a high-stakes litigation

Employing over 2,900 people globally and headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, this leading petrochemical company needed to streamline its process of identifying documents required for its legal strategy from a large collection of data. It also needed to gain timely access to key information and eliminate irrelevant and redundant data.  

Without the resources of an eDiscovery system in place to allow companies to gain a deeper insight into their electronically stored information, reviewing and protecting data can become a challenge and potential vulnerability. There is where Ricoh Canada stepped in.  

How we helped: 

• Implemented a strategic discovery workflow for 130TB across four data centres in Canada, utilizing ActiveNav Discovery Centre Content Compliance that yielded 6TB of in-scope data, which significantly reduced the customer’s overall costs 
•  Provided Ricoh eDiscovery’s Early Case Assessment and enhanced data culling workflows to simplify the process of identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing key documents for review 
•  Deployed a sophisticated intelligent review solution and leveraged relativity’s Active Learning by Ricoh for better insight, transparency and overall cost control 

Prior to beginning the document review, a 3-step process was required – Discovery Analysis by ActiveNav Discovery Centre Content Compliance, Application of Ricoh’s Early Case Assessment and Review Set Identification.  

With Ricoh and ActiveNav’s data analysis, over 130TB of unstructured data was assessed and 95% reduction in data size and 88% reduction in document count took place.  

From there it was on to Early Case Assessment. Ricoh’s ECA tools empower legal teams to quickly process and assess targeted case data to provide more timely access to key relevant information. Thereby enhancing the expediency and quality of the review process. The Ricoh team was able to review an additional 30% documents from the original set of data that was managed at this phase with the help of the ECA tool.  

Ricoh worked with the client’s legal team to plan, create and execute 173 custom searches over multiple existing and additional data sets. A total of 308,365 documents were identified for review, equating to 95% reduction in documents under potential review scope.  

The 3-step review process gave Ricoh a deeper understanding of the final documents for review, objectives and any other substantive issues.  

Ricoh was able to complete the review 20% below budget despite receiving 30% additional documents for review than originally estimated! By fully utilizing the available technology and employing a separate metadata analysis and redaction propagation workflow, Ricoh was able to save approximately 2,700 review hours and 350 redaction review hours otherwise required to manually apply the requisite redactions. This totaled a combined savings of approximately $330,000. 

Dive deeper into how this company chose to work smarter and save money with Ricoh’s help! –  Click here to read the full case study.