Case Study: Severson & Werson achieves 50% faster document review with Relativity

How Severson & Werson Used Analytics to Cut Review Time in Half

Severson & Werson, a San Francisco litigation firm, faced a massive e-discovery burden in a construction dispute—250,000 documents from multiple parties, many duplicates and near-duplicates—that had to be reviewed on a limited budget and tight timeline. Technology partner Bruce Furukawa deployed Relativity, using its text analytics within the Relativity review platform (hosted via Evolve Discovery), to prioritize and organize the corpus around the case’s key issues.

Relativity used a 200-document seed set to cluster similar files and make coding suggestions, letting reviewers surface the hottest documents first and reduce noise. The Relativity workflow boosted review rates to about 175 documents/hour for nonresponsive batches and 120/hour for responsive ones, cut the pool to roughly 1,000 priority documents, enabled senior attorneys to prepare for depositions within two weeks, and reduced projected review costs from ~$200,000 to about $100,000—about a 50% savings (with larger potential savings up to $400,000 on higher-billed matters).

Severson & Werson

Bruce Furukawa

Technology Partner