Equivio Makes Early Case Assessment More Relevant

By Marisa Peacock | Published Jan 25, 2010

Equivio Makes ECA More Relevant Early case assessment is an important part of the eDiscovery process and Equivio (news, site) demonstrates that with some updates to their product Relevance.

Early Case Assessment is Relevant

As the new decade approached, we considered what eDiscovery trends might emerge. Among them was the importance of early case assessment. For the past few years it was a nice feature to have, but not essential to the process. But it was predicted that in 2010: early case assessment would be integral part of any eDiscovery platform.

Enter Equivio>Relevance. Back in September they released their automated document prioritization system. Designed to use statistical and self-learning techniques to calculate relevant scores for each document in the data collection, Relevance changed the way documents in review are prioritized and managed.

Now, they’ve released some new updates, which work to keep up with the ever-changing rules of eDiscovery. We spoke with Warwick Sharp, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development about why Equivio>Relevance is relevant to eDiscovery, now more than ever.

Make Well-Informed Decisions

It’s not a surprise that unstructured data is the 800-pound gorilla for more companies in the enterprise. With so much information to organize, manage and review, it is no wonder that companies feel overwhelmed and under prepared to tackle it all.

Equivio>Relevance seeks to help companies find the relevant documents needed to make well-informed decisions. Finding relevant information often falls victim to human error and inexperience. Sharp says that the old way of searching by keywords doesn’t work anymore. Searching by keywords finds only 20-30% of relevant documents, making it predominantly unreliable.

With software that goes beyond the obvious keyword, Relevance finds the words we wouldn’t think of to describe the information contained within our documents. It then calculates the relevance for each document in an effort to scientifically estimate what is relevant to the search and what isn’t.

Putting the Assessment Back in ECA

Deciding which cases to settle and which to take to court are among most significant decisions companies make. But helping companies make these decision with as much relevant data is only half the battle for Equivio>Relevance. The other part is making the decision defendable in court.

Equivio>Relevance takes relevant documents and works backwards, sorting documents into three zones for which they recommend review — Zone 3 being the most crucial for review and Zone 1 being the least necessary.

In a recent case study, Equivio>Relevance-Epiq Case Study With AM Law 100 Firm, Equivio>Relevance often found thousands more documents than were initially discovered by the review team.

Table 2. Rate at which Responsive Documents Identified by Review Team

Is Equivio>Relevance Relevant for Your Company?

It’s not a matter of how big your company is that determines whether Relevance is right for you, Sharp says, but rather how much litigation your company handles. Designed to save money and time, Relevance can help any company find relevant documents quickly, efficiently and accurately.

You can find Equivio at Legal Tech NYC February 1-3 or request a demo online.