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Allensworth & Porter Brings Ediscovery In-House to Control Cases and Costs

Their Story

Allensworth & Porter is one of the leading construction law firms in Texas, representing clients in all facets of the construction industry, including architects, engineers, contractors, owners, developers, municipalities, utilities, and suppliers.

The Problem

With eight months left on its existing ediscovery contract, Allensworth & Porter surveyed the ediscovery market in an effort to investigate solutions that provided robust predictive coding capabilities. The 15-lawyer firm was becoming increasingly concerned that its previous solution lacked such automation features, which the firm viewed as a requirement. 

Whether it’s ediscovery or some other aspect of law practice, disruption is coming and automation is coming. Our philosophy is that if we have to learn new software, that’s our job, we have to be able to adapt or people are not going to hire us. 

- Tyler O’Halloran, Partner, Allensworth & Porter

A challenge for the firm was maintaining and predicting costs of new software. “If we’re going to recommend ediscovery software to a client, we need transparency and consistency in what it costs,” according to Tyler O’Halloran, a partner at Allensworth & Porter. “We have been concerned with other providers regarding annual price increases and issues with overall cost transparency.”

The Everlaw Solution

In an effort to better manage cases and control costs, Allensworth & Porter decided to eliminate managed and professional services and instead reallocate its ediscovery budget for in-house software. They chose Everlaw. 

Lawyers have an ethical responsibility to be competent in technology, and we’ve got all sorts of boxes that we have to check in terms of what we know about our clients’ data and what we have ensured the court that our client has maintained, I’m not sure you can do that if you outsource your ediscovery.

- Tyler O’Halloran

From the first trial of Everlaw, the firm discovered that Everlaw was much faster than its previous solution in searching and reviewing documents, as well as running productions. The visual search builder enabled teams to easily construct Boolean searches in a beautiful and intuitive interface, rather than manually entering strings of text. 

The firm was also impressed with the Everlaw platform’s predictive coding capabilities. In a case with as much as 500 gigabytes of data, Everlaw was able to significantly reduce the data set to a small batch of relevant documents, while providing the F1, precision, and recall metrics that were missing from the other solutions that the firm evaluated. 

The Results

Without Everlaw, Allensworth & Porter estimated that it would spend about an hour to manually process and produce approximately 300 documents that include emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and text documents. With Everlaw, the firm estimated that it can perform that same task in only 15–20 minutes on a production set of any size. The firm noted that while every file is different and these estimates may not apply to all client or opposing party data, Everlaw unquestionably offers a benefit that would otherwise be impossible without the platform’s speed and robust processing engine.

Tyler observed: “Even when you account for the cost of Everlaw, our findings are consistent that in many cases, the net benefit to the client in terms of billable fees saved outweigh the cost to keep a file on the platform.” In particular, the firm estimated that the ability to perform targeted review and utilize data visualization during initial review can eliminate 25–75 percent of billable costs that are associated with an investigation without ediscovery software. 

Allensworth & Porter considers Everlaw as a superior ediscovery solution for its clients. For Tyler, using Everlaw is like flying a helicopter versus driving a car. “You’re not operating on the same plane. It’s three dimensional versus two dimensional. It’s a different and better way of approaching a problem.” 

To learn more about how your organization can also start leveraging Everlaw for litigation, schedule a demo to see Everlaw in action!