Reduce Forensic Collection Costs with Targeted Collections
There is a common myth about Forensic collection of evidence being prohibitively expensive.
At Mulholland Forensics, we can dispel that myth by providing cost-effective Pointed or Targeted Collections. Not all Forensic cases have to be voluminous in size, nor does the fee to conduct professional, defensible collections.
Many smaller matters may not require forensic level examinations. Rather than large-scale comprehensive forensic collections, Targeted Collections may be sufficient.
By limiting the size of the data set from the onset, targeted collections can reduce costs and also requiring less attorney review time.
For an in-depth explanation please read below:
Targeted Collections vs the big “Data Grab”:
A common approach to the e-Discovery collection of documents/data commonly consists of making full forensic images of the clients’ hard drive, email server, etc. This method leads to a large volume of data being collected, even though it is known by the collecting party that most of the data will be non-responsive.
Through the use of other e-Discovery methods, filters, and search terms, the responsive data is weeded and plucked out from the bulk of the non-responsive data to create a responsive data set. These types of collections are problematic in their role during attorney review and can cause problems with its’ production – and they can be extremely costly.
The aforementioned approach to data collection increases the attorney review and causes costs to soar. In addition, the likelihood of privileged information or documents with no relation to the litigation is also increased – leaving parties able to possibly claim “document dumping” during production.
The limitations of the search-word-only method is what makes them capable of causing many unnecessary problems. The reason being this: search terms are not perfect and is by no means an exact science. It is tricky using search terms to collect the data because they can easily be too broad or too restrictive. Search terms are no match for the reliability of an employee that could easily identify documents as likely responsive during Target Collections.
Keyword searches in and of themselves need a certain level of processing to run and are likely in need of outside software, which adds costs right off the bat just to “run” the terms against a likely very large data set.
It is common that in an effort to make sure every document is reviewed, most people unintentionally create a huge data set by being too inclusive during the search term cull. The increase in a data set’s size is directly proportional to the increase in the cost for attorney review.
Target Collections can solve potential problems that the search-term-only method create as well as significantly reduce costs by limiting the size of the data set from the beginning which requires less the attorney review time.
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