Control Discovery Reduction Case Study 3

Identifying Potentially Privileged Email in a Pinch

The General Counsel for our client issued litigation hold instructions and subsequently issued memoranda discussing legal issues related to the case.

He setn these emails to law department staff and key custodians over a several-month period.

The client asked Control Discovery to isolate these messages for a privilege review by outside counsel.

Several challenges quickly became apparent:

The General Counsel inadvertently used a general-purpose company-wide 'list' to distribute the litigation hold and subsequent memoranda.

The General Counsel, a long-time and well-known figure in the company, signed each message only with his first name, a name common to a half-dozen other employees in the company.

Without a case-specific 'from' email address or a distinctive email signature, standard email search techniques proved imprecise.

Fortunately, Control Discovery was able to work with law department staff to identify a series of message content and metadata criteria that provided substantially improved search precision.

CDI tailored a solution that helped the client avoid a costly page-by-page review to isolate potentially privileged email.

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