Ingestion or Fully Processed Data?

Ingesting data to a review tool or fully process the data.  What is the difference?  Does it matter to the outcome of a case?  Well…I’ll give a real life example and you decide.
 
Law Firm Casual decided that the speed of ingesting their 250GB patent infringement case into Fast Ingestion Tool was appealing so did so over another option, Full Processing & Review Tool.  They had the data up and reviewable in about a day and a half and were reviewing shortly thereafter.  They culled their data, did some low level data analysis, ran their keyword searches and tagged their documents.  Batching and review administration was a bit lacking, but they managed.  Law Firm Casual had the ability within the Fast Ingestion Tool to tiff out their documents and brand them for production (very uncommon for the Fast Ingestion Tool market for other reasons…).  They did so, and created the production dataset that they sent to Opposing Counsel.
 
Opposing Counsel began to look at the produced data sent them in Full Processing & Review Tool and found several revealing documents that should have been tagged privilege and certain areas of the document redacted.  How did this happen?  Was there reviewer error, review tool error or something else?  Well, come to find out there were several documents in the dataset that did not have extractable text that needed to be OCR’ed to allow for Law Firm Casual’s keyword searching to hit on the document.  Fast Ingestion Tool does not have the ability to OCR and no red flag of this was presented to Law Firm Casual, so those documents were determined to be unimportant and produced with little care.  Opposing Counsel did its own OCR of the data prior to reviewing in their Full Processing & Review Tool and found the information on the second day of review.
 
Law Firm Casual began the clawback process, but as is typical, the strength of their case was hindered greatly.  An expedited settlement resulted in Law Firm Casual’s client getting substantially less than expected.  Opposing Counsel felt galvanized at their legal prowess and rode off into the sunset.  Law Firm Casual licked their wounds and began the long process of “relationship management” with their patent client in hopes of not losing them permanently.
 
Ingestion is a good option in some circumstances, but can also be detrimental.