Coordination of discovery efforts and compliance with government subpoenas and parallel multi-district, multi-party class action litigation

Oct 4 2019

eMerge helped client identify, preserve, collect, and produce terabytes of data in response to antitrust investigations by multiple state attorneys general and the DOJ, and leveraged the knowledge gained about the client’s systems and data to assist merits counsel with discovery in related class action lawsuits.

The Challenges

• Extensive reach of government investigation, which sought documents from as far back as the 1980s and required collection from legacy data sources and systems, former and deceased custodians, hard copy files, and current custodians who worked remotely
• Comply with EU data privacy laws and US discovery requirements
• Meet varying technical and substantive requirements for production to DOJ and state attorneys general
• Adhere to deadlines and production requirements of multiple parallel litigation matters while ensuring consistency in work product
• Track productions and work product across various matters and multiple law firms to ensure consistency

eMerge Solutions

eDiscovery Advocacy

• Coordinated with client’s privacy counsel to develop defensible workflows for handling cross-border data
• Assisted merits counsel with negotiating scope limitations with the government by leveraging information gained during data collection interviews, testing of search terms, and analysis of structured data repositories
• Leveraged prior work product from parallel governmental investigations in separate class action litigation

Advanced Technology & Consulting

• Developed Stub Finder, a custom email stub deduplication tool to match incomplete email stubs in active mailboxes of custodians with complete versions of emails in separate email archive to remove the stubs from the review universe, reducing volume of emails for review by over 40%
• Applied custom master workspace technology to host one set of client data that fed multiple, separate workspaces for different but related matters, allowing work product to be shared as needed and reducing hosting fees by over 50%

Managed Review Using Technology-Assisted Review Workflows

• Leveraged analytics and custom Relativity tools—including email threading, concept clustering, and privilege log generator—to improve accuracy and efficiency of managed document review
• Developed managed review workflows to ensure work product and review tagging were propagated across multiple matters without duplication of effort or inconsistency
• Staffed and managed multi-lingual review team and developed translation workflow in cooperation with client and merits counsel
• Provided support, consultation, and project management for review staffed and managed by separate outside merits counsel to ensure consistency across matters and to reduce costs to client