Construction Giant Saves 70% in a Single Matter With Everlaw
Business Outcomes
With a traditional approach, this global company would have outsourced 400,000 documents for outside counsel review, for a price tag of $260,000.
Using Everlaw, its legal team culled the data set down to the most relevant 2,500 records for active review, spending just $75,000.
This Everlaw corporate customer is a Fortune 500 construction company specializing in high-stakes, multi-billion dollar infrastructure and commercial projects across various sectors.
As construction projects scale into the billions of dollars, the volume of data involved in legal claims has exploded. On top of that, the industry generates a wide range of complex and specialized data types – from mobile phone records and video files to CAD and design files.
The company's legal leadership prioritizes early dispute resolution as part of its legal strategy – something that is increasingly difficult in the modern data environment.
“If you have a delay and a disruption claim on a project, the other side’s asking for every record,” said the company’s Assistant General Counsel for Litigation. “It’s a lot of data to parse through.”
The quicker you can get your arms around your data, the faster you can get to a reliable data set that supports your assertion or defense of a claim.
To resolve cases more quickly and efficiently, the in-house legal team has had to fundamentally re-evaluate its approach. Managing the company’s litigation and investigations across multiple legacy systems and disparate data bases while relying on outside counsel for full-service ediscovery was no longer sustainable.
“As is common with most major corporations, there’s been a big focus on our external spend and achieving more financially cost-effective resolutions,” the AGC said. “A very significant portion of our spend has been on ediscovery.”
Over the last few years, the company has brought the ediscovery process in-house and centralized litigation matters on Everlaw. Since the transition, her team has transformed its approach to litigation. The result: costs reduced year-over-year with more favorable resolutions in less time.
Taking Control In-House for More Cost-Effective Outcomes
Like many corporate legal departments, the construction company historically relied entirely on third-party vendors and outside counsel for ediscovery services.
The legal team handled data collections but outsourced everything else: data hosting and processing and management of the ediscovery database, review process, and productions. The setup meant less opportunity for strategic input and higher likelihood that costs would snowball.
“There were a lot of warning signals going up that we did not have a firm grasp on our ediscovery process and our data management,” the AGC said. “By not being in control of the platform, we realized that information critical for decision-making wasn’t always being surfaced for us. Functionality that would increase our efficiency and cost effectiveness was not made available to us.”
The move to Everlaw was driven by the desire to have full control and visibility into the company’s data and to own the work product in-house, while reducing overall litigation spend.
“This lets us form repeatable processes and learnings that we can carry from case to case with a consistent team to drive more consistent, more accurate, and more cost-effective results,” she said.
It’s a huge cost saving. And we achieved the result faster with much better quality in the work product.
Finding the Story Faster for a Stronger Litigation Posture
Achieving efficiency in the in-house legal environment is about cost and speed. The more streamlined, easier and reliable the litigation process is, the faster the team is able to get to the facts that matter most.
“I say this is about finding your story faster,” the AGC said. “The quicker you can get your arms around your data, the faster you can get to a reliable data set that supports your assertion or defense of a claim.”
With Everlaw, the legal team has been able to move to a company-directed platform and develop streamlined review workflows. The primary goal is to help the internal team reduce data volume to the most relevant documents as early in a matter as possible. The bulk of the preparation now happens up front using powerful AI and data visualization features.
Results: Reducing Costs in a Single Matter by 70%
The new approach is yielding results that can be reported to the executive suite.
In one major case, the legal team was able to narrow 700,000 records down to about 400,000 documents by culling 300,000 that were potentially responsive but not relevant.
“We completed the initial review of those 400,000 records in about three weeks, which was very fast for a small team,” the AGC said.
By the time it came to the next phase – moving documents over to the internal claims team and outside counsel – her in-house team was able to share 200,000 records that potentially hit relevant topics. Most importantly, the handoff included the 2,500 records the in-house legal team identified as most critical for immediate review. That represented a massive reduction in the documents that would otherwise have gone to an outside partner.
Legacy Approach | Modern Approach | |
|---|---|---|
Total # Documents | 700,000 | 700,000 |
# Documents Outsourced for Review | 400,00 | 2,500 |
Estimated Cost | $260,000 | $75,000 |
Estimated Cost Reduction | NA | 70% savings |
The speed and precision with which the in-house team was able to zero in on the documents that mattered most shaved off substantial time and expense. The AGC estimated that it would have cost the company $260,000 to arrive at this point using its previous third-party controlled system, not including hosting costs. By contrast, the bill using the Everlaw approach stood at $75,000 – or about 70 percent less.
“It’s a huge cost saving,” the AGC said. “It’s about one fifth of the cost I estimated for this volume of data. And we achieved the result faster with much better quality in the work product.”
Whoever has the best story and the story that’s closest to the truth faster can generally drive a resolution that’s the most financially beneficial for them.
Harnessing the Power of Repeatable Process
Bringing oversight of ediscovery in-house has other important benefits for corporate legal teams. One of the most important is the ability to reuse work product and establish consistent, repeatable processes that enhance efficiency and reduce costs across multiple matters.
“As a construction organization, we have a lot of very repeatable actions in our first-pass review,” the AGC said. “Owning the work product means not having to reinvent the wheel for every case. It means having the ability to templatize your workflow and automate some of your first-pass review to the greatest extent possible.”
These models are allowing us to learn those lessons in a building-block fashion, and it’s getting easier and easier to self-identify these data sets with less human interaction.
Everlaw’s Multi-Matter Models allow the legal team to automate repeatable actions by reusing trained AI models across multiple cases for instant AI-powered document prioritization in new matters. The models learn and get better with every case.
“Every case is different, but there's always a common thread in what we're looking for,” she said. “These models are allowing us to learn those lessons in a building-block fashion, and it’s getting easier and easier to self-identify these data sets with less human interaction.”
Isolating the Most Important Data Faster than the Other Side
The company is also able to quickly cut through irrelevant material using Everlaw’s data visualization features and dashboards.
The Data Visualizer helps the team identify key themes and patterns in large document sets while the Communications Visualizer surfaces exchanges between key parties in interactive searchable graphs.
“The data visualization tool makes it easy to drill into a set that's much more reasonably likely to contain the information you’re interested in and when you layer on another tool to see who’s talking to whom about what – it’s fantastic,” the AGC said. “Moving from a conceptual relationship between documents to a visual relationship between documents is a really effective way to think about data.”
Streamlining Reviews with Internal and External Partners
Building greater efficiencies into the review process has also meant better leveraging internal talent and outside counsel. Instead of shipping all data to outside counsel at the onset, the work is done in phases, with involvement based on expertise.
The in-house teams play a bigger role in the early stages of discovery when decisions are being made about data that is related to a particular project. “Nobody knows our data better than our people,” the AGC said. “Our primary goal is to cull it down to the most relevant, potentially ripe set as quickly as possible, and we do that all in-house.”
Outside counsel come in during the next stage, to help review data that’s relevant to discrete issues. The company’s law firms then collaborate with the it operations team, taking on a greater role in developing strategies to drill down into the most relevant data sets.
The benefit to outside counsel is to give them more freedom and flexibility to develop our case faster because the bulk of this work is done up front.
“The challenge is getting outside counsel to understand and recognize the benefit to them that the faster we can move, the more efficiently we can move to get to that core data set,” the AGC said. “The benefit only serves to give them more freedom and flexibility to develop our case faster and outside the fire of discovery deadlines because the bulk of this work is done up front.”
Discovering the Difference with Everlaw
The construction company is implementing a new approach to ediscovery. Its AGC is quick to point out that her team is driving stronger results thanks to a combination of factors: modern ediscovery technology managed internally, newly streamlined workflows with repeatable processes, and consistent internal and external talent.
With Everlaw, she has modernized the approach to litigation and investigations. The result is better control over work product and discovery spend. And when it comes to steering cases to resolution, increased visibility into the most relevant data arms the team with actionable insights to make the most meaningful decisions early on.
The bottom line depends on it, she said. “Whoever has the best story and the story that’s closest to the truth faster can generally drive a resolution that’s the most financially beneficial for them.”
