Published on Jan 14, 2020 The Situation
A developer of pharmaceutical products contacted Innovative Driven (ID) to help identify potential trade secret information on a former employee’s laptop in order to remediate the proprietary information.
The Solution
ID consulted on and implemented an analytics-based process that would significantly reduce the number of documents needing review. This workflow was comprised of three complementary parts and allowed the client to be in the driver’s seat. First, ID created conceptual clusters (organizing data by concept rather than keyword without requiring any user input) of the data on the laptop and provided a list of those clusters to the client for review.
The client was thereby able to quickly identify categories of documents that were largely proprietary or personal in nature and designate them for the corresponding treatment.
Some clusters appeared to contain both the client’s and the employee’s information, so for any cluster that was not easily classified, ID provided the client with a list of document file names to allow for quick classification of proprietary information.
Finally, ID provided an experienced contract attorney reviewer for any remaining documents that the client was not able to quickly classify.
The Result
ID had the list of clusters ready for the client’s within one day after receiving the laptop. This cluster review approach allowed the client to address 32k of the 40k documents on the laptop in a matter of hours. The client was then able to address 5.6k of the remaining 6k documents within a day via the file name list, and the ID-provided reviewer completed a review of the final 400 documents the following day. ID’s forensic team then performed the remediation of the identified proprietary information the following day, completing the entire process in five days and requiring an actual review of only a small fraction of the documents themselves.
