The matter

An in-house legal team instructed Jandr to manage a DSAR arising in the context of an employment dispute. The requestor was a former employee. The matter was extremely sensitive — a dispute between founders and directors of a mid-sized company, with potentially adverse consequences for employees and third party funders.

The data

266,000 documents (160GB) were collected from the client and uploaded into Everlaw. Around 24,000 duplicates were removed on upload, leaving 242,000 documents for processing.

The challenge

Initial search term testing identified one term alone that would have returned around 160,000 documents. We identified the issue early, excluded the problematic term, and refined the search parameters. 14,500 documents were responsive to the agreed terms.

What we did

We reduced the reviewable dataset in stages. Around 5,500 inclusive emails were excluded as their content was captured in other documents within the same threads. A further 4,000 documents were bulk excluded — communications to which the requestor or his lawyers were party, and privileged client-lawyer communications. That left 4,881 documents for manual review.

The outcome

The total cost of receiving, processing, searching, reviewing and producing the DSAR response was under £10,000 excluding VAT — on a dataset that started at 266,000 documents.