Case Study: Ballard Spahr achieves a 90% reduction of a 2.8M document collection with Relativity

Ballard Spahr Eliminates More Than 80% of a Collection

Ballard Spahr was assisting a government agency in a contract dispute and inherited an overly broad collection of 2.8 million documents. The e-discovery team needed to eliminate most irrelevant material during early case assessment, and traditional search and filter techniques left too many nonresponsive documents for review—so they turned to Relativity and its Analytics capabilities.

Using Relativity Analytics, Ballard Spahr built a heat map to visualize where conceptually similar document groupings overlapped with search terms, custodians, and email domains, allowing them to exclude keyword hits that were otherwise irrelevant. With Relativity, they eliminated roughly 2.5 million documents, cutting the reviewable population to 277,380 documents—an over 80% reduction—and sped up their ECA with actionable visual dashboards.

Ballard Spahr

Caroline Pollard

Manager of eDiscovery Services