Early case assessment (ECA) is a critical step in the discovery process that lets attorneys rapidly evaluate the scope of a case, pinpoint key information, and develop a winning litigation strategy. With the help of ECA eDiscovery tools, you can proactively find smoking gun evidence and mitigate potential risks early on. This can be a game-changer when it comes to building a strong case and achieving a successful outcome.
The key benefits of ECA are:
• Cost-effectiveness: Identifying key issues and relevant documents early on, means you can focus efforts and resources on the most important case areas. Slashing this discovery time equates to significant cost savings for clients or for your in-house team.
• Strategy development: By conducting ECA, you gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your case. You can then use this information to develop a tailor-made, winning litigation strategy.
• Early settlement: We’ll get into this more in a minute but for now let’s just say that early case assessment helps you identify opportunities for early settlement. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your case, you may be able to negotiate a favorable settlement before the case goes to trial.
• Risk management: ECA can also help you identify potential risks associated with the case. You can use this information to develop strategies that mitigate these risks and minimize potential damages.
Old-School ECA
Early case assessment is a smart, essential process that improves the efficiency and success of your cases. The purpose of ECA is to develop the right strategy for the litigation or settlement of a case early one. What’s not to love?
Well, if you’re still operating like it’s 2010, ECA is a chore, not an advantage.
Manual processes are so antiquated it’s hard to believe they're still in use. But this is the legal industry we're talking about here, and many legal teams are still muddling through ECA. Reading or searching manually through documents to identify relevant information is a huge time and resource drain and frequently involves a significant amount of guesswork and intuition. That's all well and good if you're trying to get out of an escape room, but not so much when dealing with costly legal issues.
Then, of course, those legal teams have to manage the information by collating it on spreadsheets – everyone's favorite – leaving themselves guessing about potential legal issues.
The Early Bird’s Toolkit: How eDiscovery tools can help ECA
Did you know that in the U.S., more than 90 percent of all cases settle prior to trial? In federal cases, this number is closer to 98%. This makes discovery a de facto form of dispute resolution in U.S. courts.
That’s why the early phases of discovery are arguably the most important of any legal battle or dispute. It's during this phase that you figure out if your side can go ahead with the legal action or if it's smarter to go for a settlement or alternative resolution. The sooner you can gather all the info you need about your case, the better.
The good news is that nowadays, many early case assessment tools are ultra-streamlined and are designed with best practices in mind. This means that lawyers can quickly come up with a case strategy, figure out the case's scope, estimate costs and timelines, and make well-informed choices about whether to settle or go to court.
The typical early case assessment toolkit collects, processes, and analyzes data from a multitude of sources – emails, documents, and other digital files. The collected data is then reviewed and analyzed to identify important information and key players.
With the help of automatic processing, all this is accomplished at lightning speed, so you can get started earlier and complete the review faster. Smart analytics and AI-powered features help you easily find your key facts and smoking guns with keyword filtering, search features, etc.
Legal teams are turning to technology more and more to analyze and intelligently cull case data at an early stage instead of going through documents one-by-one with the naked eye only to determine that a case was not worth pursuing.
For example, Logikcull’s early case assessment software can save you a lot of time and hassle by getting rid of unnecessary documents. With automatic data sorting and processing, the platform can identify and exclude duplicates, corrupt files, system files, privileged documents, and other irrelevant data from the review process. This means you won't have to waste time reviewing unimportant documents. Pretty cool, right?
Culling filters like the ones Logikcull offers let you zero in on the data that matters the most. It's kind of like how Amazon uses filters to whittle down massive amounts of info. You can use these filters to look for emails sent to or from particular domains, files bigger than a certain size, or docs created within a specific time frame.
We won’t say it makes ECA as fun as shoe shopping, but it’s not far off.
Picking the right keywords and combos can help you locate the most relevant docs and get a feel for the scope of the review and the strength of the evidence. When you have a tool that indexes all stop words and special characters, and supports advanced and bulk searches with boolean operators, you'll be able to find the evidence quickly.
ECA tools can do more than just help you identify important words and topics in emails and documents. They can also give you insight into how people talk about their work, which can help you create a simple word list to find smoking gun documents and evidence later on. By analyzing the language used by custodians, these tools can identify essential words and unexpected terms that may be useful search topics. So not only do these tools make searching easier, but they can also help you uncover vital evidence.
The most effective way to enhance your case evaluation is to use eDiscovery platforms that support ECA. You can gain a competitive edge from the outset of your matters than can save you time, money, and headaches later on.
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If you’d like to see how Logikcull can automate your early case assessment process, feel free to book a demo today. It’s worth it.
