How Veolia Handles Terabytes of Discovery Data — In House and With a Team of One

Problems

HOSTING FEES THREATEN TO BUST THE BUDGET

In 2015, Veolia North America faced a contract dispute with records stretching back over 20 years. With 1.49 terabytes of data to review, redact, cull, and produce, the legal team faced a potentially budget-destroying discovery process. With a traditional vendor model, line items like processing, project management, and tech time could quickly add up, while the cost of hosting that data would become astronomical:

Per-GB Hosting Costs:(GB uploaded x $25) + $250 monthly matter fee = monthly matter cost

$29,800 monthly hosting fee x 10months = $298,000 in hosting costs alone

‍

PER-MAT TER PRICING ELIMINATES AMAJOR COST CENTER

With Logikcull, Veolia has a solution that allows them to handle large data sets without having to worry about monthly, per-gigabyte fees or expensive third-party vendors. As a subscription customer, Veolia North America was able to benefit from a customized pricing plan tailored to their needs. But even under Logikcull’s per-matter, pay-as-you-go model, a team handling a matter of this size would save over a quarter of a million dollars—on hosting fees alone.

Per-Matter Pricing Savings: $250 per matter, per month, plus $25 per GB uploaded (1,490GB x $25/gb) + ($250 per month x 10 months) = $39,750

Veolia saved $258,250 on hosting fees.

"Data size doesn’t intimidate us. With Logikcull, we can handle matters that other in-house teams shy away from."

‍Katie Lynch‍
Director of Legal Support, Veolia North America

‍

‍

Problems

REVIEW COSTS CAN’T KEEP PACE WITH GROWING DATA SIZE

Though hosting fees, processing costs, and vendor line items can quickly add up, review is where the true costs lie. As data and document sizes continue to expand, those costs are becoming increasingly unsupportable. In this one matter, the document corpus at issue included 5.5million documents and 30,948,788 pages.

Manual review would have cost millions; TAR would have taken months just to set up and required a large reviewer set. Veolia needed a way to quickly cull down their data and drastically reduce the number of documents requiring outside counsel review.

Manual Review Costs: Assuming $350 hourly rate for outside counsel review and a 50-document-per-hour review rate(5,500,000/50)*$350 = $38,500,000

Assuming a 50% cull rate before review: $19,250,000 for manual review

Solutions

DEDUPLICATION AND CULLING INTELLIGENCE SLASHES REVIEW COSTS

When Veolia loads documents into Logikcull, they are automatically processed and deduplicated. Automatic deduplication alone was able to dramatically cut down the number of documents Veolia faced, reducing the data by more than half. From there,Lynch was then able to apply Logikcull’s Culling Intelligence to quickly focus in on the relevant documents. Keyword search then reduced the data set further.

In the end, only14,826 docs, 359,000 pages, and 9 GB of data were produced to outside counsel for review, a reduction of 99.4%.

Before Logikcull:

1.49 TB

5.5 million docs

30,948,788 pages

After ECA in Logikcull:

9 GB (99.4% reduction)

14,826 docs (99.8% reduction)

359,000 pages (98.9% reduction)

“Any time we can cut down outside review, we’re going to see big savings.”

‍Katie Lynch‍
Director of Legal Support, Veolia North America

‍

‍

Handling Massive Projects In-House,Without a Massive Team

Facing 1.49 terabytes of data and short case deadlines, Veolia North America was able to meet its obligations while dramatically reducing costs, all with a small, agile team. IT teams helped with data collection, but “in terms of the legal team, this was all handled by me, ”Veolia North America’s Director ofLegal Support Katie Lynch explains.

The efficiency Veolia achieved even helped in negotiations with counsel. “The usual objection is that they always want to see everything,”Lynch says. “To which I ask, ‘what would your approach to 5.5 million docs be?’ Then we start to collaborate to narrow the universe of documents.” And since Lynch has been able to build valuable in-house experience, she often knows just where to look to get the data that matters.

With Logikcull, Veolia North America can gain instant insights into that data: automatic categorization provides an immediate overview of the document corpus, bulk keyword search allows users to quickly ascertain the number of documents that will hit for a large range of search queries, and potential privilege detection enables the team to focus in on some of the most urgent communications instantly.

With Logikcull, Veolia’s legal team can stay agile and effective, while handling matters that others would balk at—and to dramatically cut costs at the same time.