Brown Rudnick's Blueprint for Early Case Assessment 

When Brown Rudnick picks up a new case, it picks up hundreds of gigabytes of data. To kick off the matter, the team has to haul over ESI from custodians whose Outlook inboxes stretch back years or Slack channels with 100+ overly active participants. This voluminous collection and early case assessment (ECA) is where the matter starts. And the amount of money and time discovery will consume gets decided here.  

Every gigabyte that gets promoted into review is a gigabyte the client pays to process and host, and every document that lands in front of a reviewer costs hours. The firms that want to control those costs strategically make data decisions early, narrowing the review set from the jump.  

When firms aren't able to do that, the costs add up. Brown Rudnick experienced that firsthand. Under its previous workflow, the litigation technology team would often process an entire dataset before it could see how much was relevant. That meant charging clients for data that was roughly "95 percent non-responsive."

Today, the firm follows a different blueprint.

The Team: Brown Rudnick's “Fantastic Four”

Brown Rudnick is a 242-attorney international law firm known for high-profile, cross-border work in litigation, restructuring, investigations, and more. Discovery across the firm runs through four litigation technology professionals, a team jokingly known as the "Fantastic Four":

• Dawud Burke, Senior Litigation Technology Manager

• Danesh Imran, Senior Litigation Technology Specialist

• Brittany Veilleux, Litigation Technology Specialist

• Benjamin Davies-Mathurin, Litigation Support & IT

The team runs like a well-oiled machine, dividing responsibilities and tag-teaming requests as they load, ingest, process, and prepare data for review in Reveal.  

Step 1: Filter First

Before any data reaches review, the team applies search terms, date filters, and other criteria first, then promotes only the narrower, more relevant population.

On one recent matter, they started with approximately 1 TB of data and, by filtering, narrowed it to about 85 GB of billable hosted data. That's a 92% data reduction, which means 92% less data to host and review, unlocking savings for both the firm and its clients.  

For one custodian on that matter, the savings showed up directly on the client's bill. As Burke put it, "we saved 45 percent."

Step 2: Ask Before You Read

When you start with a mountain of data, the challenge is figuring out where case teams should invest their focus.

In Brown Rudnick's London office, Reveal AI's search and analysis capability has become central to early case assessment. When a matter starts, case teams use Reveal's natural-language search function to query the data. They get an initial read on the evidence without committing hours to document-by-document review.  

This gets teams oriented faster and ensures attorneys' time and judgment go toward the documents that matter.

Step 3: Let Early Answers Shape the Search

The early insights from Reveal AI's search and analysis capability help Brown Rudnick's case teams develop more informed search criteria, so the review that follows starts from a sharper picture of the evidence.

Brown Rudnick's early case assessment works because each step feeds the next. Filtering shrinks the dataset. Early questions reveal what's in it. Better search criteria focus review on what matters. So when the litigation team hands off the matter to case teams, they are off to the races immediately.  

Apply the Blueprint to Your Next Matter

Brown Rudnick's early case assessment blueprint comes down to one principle: decide what belongs in review before the data gets there.

Think over your last few matters. Did you host large volumes of irrelevant data? Did you waste hours on documents that could be filtered out or queried away? If yes, try Brown Rudnick's blueprint on your next matter.  

Read the full Brown Rudnick case study

Reveal is a leading AI-powered platform for eDiscovery, document review, legal hold, and investigations. Its best-in-class suite of products includes Logikcull, Onna, Reveal Hold, and Reveal Enterprise. Reveal's software combines technology and human guidance to transform structured and unstructured data into actionable insight, helping law firms, corporations, government agencies, and service providers uncover useful information faster. For more, visit revealdata.com.