Case Study: Steptoe achieves $2.7M client savings on DOJ Second Request with Relativity Assisted Review

Steptoe Saves Client $2.7 Million on DOJ Second Request

Steptoe faced a DOJ second-request review of about 2.6 million documents with roughly a four-week deadline and turned to Relativity’s Analytics and Assisted Review to meet the challenge. The firm needed a fast, defensible way to triage and classify massive volumes of data while convincing skeptical case teams of predictive coding’s value.

Using Relativity, Steptoe sifted out irrelevant material, pushed 1.76 million documents into Assisted Review, trained the model with lawyer-coded examples, and used the algorithm to categorize 486,000 documents as responsive (bypassing 1.27 million as not relevant and classifying 57% of privilege-eligible documents as irrelevant). The responsiveness review finished in 600 hours at a $300,000 cost versus an estimated 26,000 hours and $3,000,000 for linear review—saving the client $2.7 million and 25,400 review hours—and the success drove broader Analytics adoption across the firm.

Steptoe

Kate Bauer

Practice Solutions Architect