Product Review
By Montgomery N. Kosma and Paul H. McVoy
LJN’s Legal Tech Newsletter® Volume 22, Number 4 • July 2004
Document Review with Attenex® Patterns® E-Discovery Software
Imagine you have received 35 gigabytes of data consisting of normal office documents and e-mail. You have agreed with your opponents to deliver rolling productions starting in 4 weeks, and completing your production of all the relevant material in 12. You have 12 junior associates with plans to work 10 hour days, 5 days a week. Not a problem. You have a sophisticated review system where documents are converted into images and their metadata is collected into a tidy database that you can neatly parcel into review sets for your attorneys. Using the standard 70,000 pages per gigabyte, seven pages per document, your 12 attorneys will only need 50 days to complete the review, which would be 10 days ahead of schedule, barring any major delays or distractions.
Now imagine that your data doubles. There were forgotten back-up tapes. Also, you discover that the original 30 custodians from whom you gathered data are insufficient to satisfy your discovery burden, and you need to go back out on week 3 and pull files from an additional 30 custodians. By the end of week 4, you have 300 gigabytes of data and no let up in your deadlines. Your initial cost and time estimates have just been multiplied by 10.
In the old world of document review, this might have posed an insurmountable problem, but at Jones Day we have been exploring the use of a new software tool that makes the above scenario inconvenient, not disastrous. The product is Attenex Patterns e-discovery software. Like some other products, Patterns performs concept analysis on a set of documents. What sets it apart is that Patterns uses the results of concept analysis to organize a set of documents into a structured visual snapshot of the documents and how they relate to one another. Attenex Patterns has enabled our review team to increase review rates, efficiency and accuracy by grouping similar documents together by concept. In the real-world situation outlined above, with the help of Attenex Patterns and a dedicated review team, we were able to complete the review on time, and more important for our client, at a fraction of the cost the same type of review would have been 6 months ago.
At first glance, Attenex Patterns seems to present little more than eye-candy, a re-creation of DNA sequences, or perhaps random electronic mappings of large beehive colonies. It is, in fact, a simple visual representation of a document collection where individual documents are grouped together by noun and noun phrases. Each document is represented on the screen by a colored dot. Each document’s representative dot is grouped with other dots into a document group, or “cluster.” A document group is made up of documents that the Attenex Patterns algorithm has determined to be similar based on their nouns and noun phrases, and the pattern in which they appear within each document. The circles representing the document clusters are then arranged on what Attenex terms “spines,” which are lines that connect document groups. The spines are the core concepts that unite all of the document groups and therefore all of the documents within those groups together.
About Attenex
Attenex was developed in Seattle, WA, to help manage the document discovery in the Exxon Valdez case. Attenex offers its software through third-party providers situated around the country. We are currently using a service provider based in Phoenix, AZ, which hosts the Attenex software package and delivers the content to our review staff over a secure Internet link using Citrix. This enables us to use lawyers from any of our offices to assist in large document reviews.
About the Authors
Paul McVoy is a Project Manager in the Washington, DC office of Jones Day. He coordinates and manages all aspects of large litigation matters and antitrust 2nd requests from document collection to electronic processing, review and production.
Montgomery Kosma is an antitrust lawyer in Jones Day’s Washington, DC office. He handles mergers and acquisitions as well as criminal and civil litigation matters for clients in numerous industries. In a previous life, he was a software engineer.