Recognized for Its Innovative Use of Technology, Lovells Leverages Attenex Patterns to Cut Discovery Time in Half
SEATTLE — April 19, 2005 — Attenex® Corp., a developer of electronic document review software for litigation and regulatory response, today announced that Lovells, the fifth largest law firm in Europe and the sixth largest international law firm in the world, selected Attenex to significantly reduce the time and cost of discovery in an important case, resulting in a 75 percent cost savings for the client.
Lovells is an international business law firm with offices in major financial and commercial centers across Europe, Asia and the United States. The firm was assigned to assist its client in the evaluation of potential conspiracy and fraud claims arising from a complex multi-party transaction. The investigation required the review of 35 gigabytes of restored e-mail data – the equivalent of 2 million pages of documents. Using traditional electronic review methods, the estimated cost of discovery was $4-5 million taking nearly an entire year of work. The project was too costly to recommend using traditional discovery methods, requiring new, proven technologies to review a huge set of electronic documents within a strictly fixed budget and staffing schedule.
Lovells invited five litigation support providers including FTI Consulting Inc., the premier provider of corporate finance/restructuring, forensic and litigation consulting and technology, and economic consulting, to propose solutions that would both conserve attorney review time and preserve their work product for effective use in the anticipated litigation. FTI, an Attenex Advantage Partner, proposed a two-stage review protocol using the Attenex Patterns E-Discovery Platform to cull the data set and identify potentially key documents for the focused second review, and Ringtail Solutions for subject-matter coding and a variety of litigation management tools.
"The challenge in discovery is that whatever you are looking for - key facts, hot documents, privileged materials - is often buried in massive volumes of irrelevant material that consumes attorney time and drives up costs," said Kathy McFarland, Of Counsel at Lovells. "The more efficiently you can isolate what is important from what is not, the more effective you can be for your client. Using Attenex, we were able to test our legal theories against the e-mail record,
resulting in a stronger complaint and better opportunities for our client to reach a desired result either in settlement or in court."
The Attenex review took only six weeks using five junior associates as reviewers. Attenex Patterns® enabled the reviewers to view information grouped by concepts and relationships versus blind key-word searches common with other discovery software. The solution clusters related material into a concept map, which presents documents that attorneys can identify or categorize as highly relevant or grossly irrelevant in a very quick manner. Attenex helped Lovells capture approximately 11,000 key documents out of nearly 2 million pages exported. “Attenex helped us isolate the most important items, cutting the overall time it took to review the documents by one half,” added McFarland.
“Today’s discovery process has been drastically changed by the wide-scale use of new technologies, including PCs, Blackberries, servers, CD ROMs and DVDs,” said Brian Schlosser, CEO of Attenex. “With more than 90 percent of new material created in electronic form, legal professionals today are faced with new, critical issues that can result in a great deal of lost capital. We recognize the unique demands of the new e-discovery landscape and strive to empower forward-thinking executives and professionals, like Kathy McFarland, to address these issues with innovation and ease.”
About Lovells
Lovells is an international business law firm with offices in major financial and commercial centers across Europe, Asia and the United States. The firm has 345 partners and more than 1,622 lawyers worldwide, employing a staff of 3,200. With a total of 26 offices, Lovells is the fifth largest law firm in Europe and the sixth largest international law firm in the world. For more information, visit www.lovells.com.
About Attenex
Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Attenex is a business-to-business software company that provides tools that enable corporations, law firms and government agencies to improve the efficiency of processing and reviewing electronic documents, as well as managing e-discovery projects. These efficiencies dramatically reduce the total cost of discovery for clients while saving valuable review time. For more information about the company and its products, call (206) 373-6565 or visit www.attenex.com.