Culling Unneeded Data Saves Time And Money

Knowing which information to share with partners is critical, and there are many technological aids to safe information sharing. Sometimes, though, knowing which information NOT to share can be just as critical for business and economic reasons. FTI has released a new appliance, RingTail QuickCull, to help companies when it comes to deciding what information should be shared with legal teams during pre-trail and discovery operations.

According to Joel Jacobs, product marketing manager for FTI, the biggest single reason for using a product like QuickCull is financial. Jacobs says, "[QuickCull] will be run on the client premises to cull data before going to review with the outside counsel. It should reduce the cost of legal review by reducing the amount of data that is reviewed. Getting files out of the way that don't need to be reviewed is critical." Jacobs says that legal teams billing on an hourly basis must go through all the information provided by the client for a case. Targeting the information and eliminating duplication from records like phone logs, email logs and customer records can significantly reduce the time required for case review.

Focusing the information provided to a law firm can help the client in other ways, according to Jacobs. He says, "We can run key words and searches against data so teams can get a picture of the data before review."  Eliminating the "fog" of redundant information can help reduce confusion and aid a legal team in properly understanding the relevant facts of the situation they're presented with.

QuickCull is based on indexing and data optimization algorithms developed by FTI. Jacobs describes the operation of the appliance, saying, "We've done tuning and optimization on the data; it indexes and de-dups sets of data, automatically tagging masters and duplicates. From there, QuickCull presents the information for search and retrieval. There can be any number of tags." Addressing questions of privacy and security, Jacobs says, "The owner has complete control of the process and the data. Marking and tagging information can be saved prior to sending files off for review."

Once the data has been indexed and tagged, the information can be accessed by both client and legal team employees through the web. User roles are established by the client to control who can do what with which data. The QuickCull appliance will also render the data so that users can see the entirety of the document. All the information developed by the QuickCull is stored in EDRM XML (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) for compatibility with other systems and software.The QuickCull is built on a Dell server and priced on a per-gigabyte processed basis. The base unit is designed as a 100-gigabyte per day unit, with accelerator units available to speed larger data requirements. Jacobs says that the metadata developed by QuickCull is stored on the appliance, with document and source data stored on a NAS device attached to the client network.