Ballard Spahr Saves Client More than $125,000 on a Document QC Project

How did they do it?

• Used Relativity to automatically compare 15,000 pages and help reviewers identify discrepancies
• Completed the project in 23 days at an $18,000 cost to the client

When an auto sales and financing company previously upgraded the software they used to generate sale and loan documents, state and local regulators found problems with the legal disclosures in the standard forms. Now, the company was upgrading to a new system and wanted to avoid the errors they previously experienced. They needed the new system to generate 15,000 pages with the exact language and formatting as the originals. Time was of the essence because they couldn't move forward on using the new software platform until they finished a document comparison and confirmed the platform generated everything accurately.

They immediately approached Ballard Spahr about conducting a manual comparison of the documents to determine which documents in the new system needed to be corrected, and they insisted two reviewers conduct a side-by-side comparison of the documents-reading each document back-and-forth to each other. While Ballard Spahr delivered on the request, and the two contract reviewers analyzed 200 pages successfully, it took them two and a half days to get through only one percent of the documents. Unsatisfied that the entire project was on track to cost their client an estimated $145,000 and months of work, Gary Melhuish, manager of litigation support services for Ballard Spahr, started looking for alternative solutions.

Gary consulted his colleague Caroline Pollard, manager of e-discovery services at the firm, to brainstorm ideas that could expedite the review process and maintain a trustworthy process. After thinking through a few options, Caroline recalled a conversation she recently had at Relativity Fest about a feature in Relativity that can compare documents automatically by identifying any discrepancies from the extracted text. Gary set up a workflow where the two reviewers could scroll through the document comparisons in the viewer to identify inconsistencies, and cross-check the paper documents in front of them, allowing them to focus only on the areas where differences existed. With the new workflow, they completed the project in about 23 days at an $18,000 cost to the client, resulting in more than $125,000 in savings.

“Relativity helped solve an urgent, out-of-the-box problem for our client. They came to us looking to staff a manual process, but we were able to deliver a simplified, and much more cost-effective solution.”
GARY MELHUISH, Manager of Litigation Support Services