Insurance Defense Data Crunch
A large insurance carrier was sued for coverage in a product liability matter. The plaintiff initially produced approximately 6 million pages of discovery in electronic format. Unfortunately for the insurer, due to the plaintiff’s use of multiple vendors, the data was produced in a variety of formats which also contained numerous “systemic” errors, such as images that could not be viewed. The variety of data formats and the systemic errors prevented the insurer’s counsel from loading and accessing the produced documents.
Prior to ACT’s retention, the insurer hired a company to “fix” the data. After 6 weeks and nothing to show for their efforts, the insurer fired the first company and retained ACT. ACT attacked the problem from scratch and had the first set of data “normalized,” OCR’d and available for review within 2 weeks.
Another complication was that the case was on a discovery fast track. By the time review was ready to start, the plaintiff had produced an additional 4 million pages for a then-total of 10 million. Defense counsel had approximately 3 months before a quadruple tracking deposition schedule started. ACT recognized that a robust system would be needed to support a large number of users and the large volume of OCR’d data. ACT implemented new iCONECTnxt software on state-of-the-art systems, co-located at Savvis Corporation.
Upon recognizing that outside counsel’s internal review capacity would not be sufficient to meet the case schedule, ACT assisted in the retention of an outsourced review team. Between outside counsel and the outsourced team, a total of 300 reviewers worked simultaneously on ACT’s hosted review platform. With process and quality control measures in place, the combined team was able to review 10 million pages of review in 100 days.
Over the course of the next year, plaintiffs produced an additional 12 million pages for a total of 22 million pages. ACT was able to normalize and host all of the produced data in timely manner to support the ongoing review and deposition preparation.