eDiscovery Leaders Live: Esther Garcia of Epiq
Esther Garcia, Senior Consultant, Advanced Technologies, Case Insights, at Epiq, joins George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive.
Currently a senior consultant at Epiq focused on developing and delivering case insights, Esther also has been a Case Insight Consultant, Technology Assisted Review, and Senior Review Manager at Epiq. Before that Esther was a project manager, review manager, and contract attorney at Consilio and Advanced Discovery, and prior to that, she was an attorney at Choe Law Group. Barred in California, Esther received her JD from Southwestern Law School and her BA from the University of San Diego.
Esther started the discussion by explaining what she and Epiq mean by “case insights” and how their case insights approach differs from more traditional approaches to eDiscovery. She talked about how with this approach they use AI to develop an initial understanding of a matter, find and follow trends in the data, and through that find key pieces of information. Esther spend the remaining of the session describing some of the AI capabilities they use, when and how they use them, and the value they and clients derive from this approach – from finding key documents to answering key questions to determining gaps in data sets.
Key Highlights
- [2:03] What “case insights” means.
- [3:22] How the case insights approach compares with a more traditional approach to eDiscovery.
- [6:13] What the case insights process looks like for a client: a personal, consultative approach.
- [6:40] Gathering resources and putting data into AI tools to develop an initial understanding of the matter.
- [7:45] Following data trends with AI to help clients find key pieces of information.
- [9:30] Data trend analysis tools she uses: communications maps, sentiment analysis, clustering, entity analysis.
- [11:32] Bringing technology and experience to bear to quickly find meaningful data trends.
- [14:00] How many people they typically use for these projects.
- [15:44] Using case insight services throughout the life of a matter.
- [18:00] Using these capabilities for depositions and the like.
- [20:47] What types of clients the case insights team works with.
- [21:28] Using communications analysis to find gaps in incoming productions.
- [22:34] Other trends they look for: timeline gaps, suddenly changing attachment counts, domains in play.
- [24:38] Using AI to answer key questions.
- [27:25] Confirm, refute, and find anomalies.
- [29:15] Using AI models to find anomalies and inconsistencies.
Key Quotes by Esther Garcia
- “The Case Insights team at Epiq provides case teams with insight to how to approach the dataset, whether investigatory needs, production needs, or just understanding from a very top overview what information do I currently have and have I done my collections properly.”
- “At times, you could say that we just trim the fat of the review where it’s using advanced technologies like Reveal and Brainspace in order to help us just get to the focus intent of the client…. Case insights is taking on trimming the fat and giving you the crème de la crème.”
- “It’s following the data trends and that’s what the AI tools really do well. [AI] highlights data trends that the human eye or a human person can’t quickly understand.”
- “There’s matters where I have jumped into the dataset and within seven hours have found the most significant hot documents, which then leads to an immediate settlement or negotiations – which is something that just recently happened.”
- “When I do have an investigatory need, I do ask myself ‘How are people acting in other data trends’ because as a psychologist once said to me, ‘People don’t really change their habits much’. If you are trying to find key themes…your key group of people or key issues are going to probably have some reiteration from other matters.”
- “If I make a search withing Reveal NexLP or Brainspace and then all of a sudden I start seeing that all the key communicators that I have on my radar are being highlighted then I know I am on the right trend of finding additional documents that are probably key and significant for the case.”
- “NexLP’s communications analysis did a really great job of highlighting the conversations that were redacted and never logged and then also at the same time the conversations that just abruptly ended.”