Law Firm Navigates High-Stakes Class Action Litigation

Our client had taken on a high-stakes, high-profile class action suit that, if successful, could result in a settlement impacting one of the world’s largest electronic consumer products companies and their customers. The client was faced with reviewing millions of pages of complex, highly technical documents provided by the defendant, and would require Protiviti to provide project management support and hiring contract attorneys to complete the review. The project needed to be conducted at an accelerated pace to meet the deposition deadline.

Accomplishing a herculean task

The client reached out to Protiviti Legal Consulting (Protiviti is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Robert Half International) to provide discovery assessment assistance, which included securing a team of experienced contract attorneys with deep engineering knowledge. The engagement comprised of reviewing and coding documents produced by the opposing party. In addition to the sheer volume of documentation to be reviewed, the files were filled with complex and unique nomenclature and product model information, along with details of design and manufacturing, both pre- and post-consumer production. We needed to wade through the materials to pin down the deficiencies found in each product – a herculean task accelerated using predictive coding and machine learning algorithms.

Led by a seasoned engagement leader, the team (which scaled to meet the demand) quickly and efficiently culled through thousands of documents that included complex engineering terminology, product codes and acronyms that had to be distilled and catalogued.

While the opposing counsel assumed the document review would take a considerable amount of time, our team was able to meet the tight deadline, resulting in opposing counsel requesting a court extension to review the plaintiff’s work.

Project management included:

• Coordinating document review;
• supporting discovery strategy, including identifying data sources and documents not provided by opposing counsel;
• developing several deliverables, which required understanding and defining the defendant’s product acronyms;
• preparing deposition materials, including recreating retail layouts and all relevant advertising and marketing materials that were provided to consumers during the various iterations of the product features, which were at the heart of the litigation; and
• preparing witnesses for deposition.

A trusted partnership

Our team applied innovative approaches in leveraging the client’s existing technology, which enabled us to create customised workflows to quickly analyse and identify the unique product components that were described in the defendant’s documentation. There were over 20,000 unique data storage links identified within the discovery documents, and a third of those were directly related to the defendant’s search terms. In addition, we utilised the client’s software tools to analyse reviewer performance, provide daily report metrics, and shared additional insights into the review, preparing a daily report of reviewer notes. Additionally, we supplemented the client's technology with our own analytic tools to help produce reports for the court that the client, otherwise, would not have been able to achieve under the tight deadlines.

The ability to nimbly staff, project manage and meet an aggressive timeline proved to be a significant trust-builder with the client. The first phase, document review, was completed expeditiously, eliminating the need for plaintiff deposition extensions, a clear surprise to opposing counsel. As a result of our project performance and deep legal expertise, the client extended our work to include additional phases of pre-litigation preparedness. The partnership also expanded into two new workstreams, comprising class certification on the original case and drafting motions for other court litigation in progress.