In today’s digital age of information deluge, email is still considered as one of the most preferred methods of communication.

With an average office worker receiving 121 business-related emails per day or approximately 9000 to 15000 emails per year, a mammoth amount of data is generated over the year, even if a limited number of custodians (data owners) are involved.

Such an overflow of data can cause significant problems during the eDiscovery phase, where reviewers have to review a large number of documents to sort ‘relevant’ ones. Since email review is a resource-intensive process involving high costs, the risk of overlooking or skipping vital information hidden in huge volumes of data can be detrimental to the eDiscovery project.

Let’s delve into the world of email ESI and explore the best practices and techniques for handling email data. This article sheds light on email thread analysis and its advantages. In my next article in this email eDiscovery series, I will emphasize the holistic approach that modern eDiscovery practitioners consider while tackling email data in eDiscovery.

Understanding Email Threading: Weaving the Fabric of Conversations

With internet penetration getting stronger and readily accessible to everyone, according to one estimate, around 361.6 billion emails will be sent and received per day in 2024.

What is email threading?

Email threading cohesively brings together email messages with the same context in a single thread. Each single thread or “branch” can be viewed as a coherent conversation containing all the back-and-forth communication done through emails, along with any attachments.

In eDiscovery’s context, Email threading analysis, a common feature in eDiscovery software, uses efficient algorithms to identify these conversational threads, and advanced techniques employ various factors, such as Email Headers, Subject Lines, Content Analysis, and more, to group emails.

Email Threading simplifies the document review process undertaken by reviewers during litigation or investigation. Visualizing all the emails in a single thread arranged contextually in one place helps reviewers connect the dots in conversation.

Reviewing all related emails in a single thread reduces the risk of inconsistent email coding (tagging) during document review and helps ensure that no critical evidence or information is left unturned.

Benefits of Email Threading in eDiscovery: A Multifaceted Advantage

Email threading through its benefits provides impetus to the entire eDiscovery process, transforming the review process. Some of the key benefits offered include:

  • Turbocharged Review Speed:

    Email threading can significantly accelerate the document review process. Reviewers can see the entire group of contextually related emails in a single thread, allowing them to focus on the flow of conversation rather than individual messages.

    Email threads help properly identify inclusive emails that contain all the content of previous emails in a particular thread. Reviewing the inclusive emails ensures critical information is not missed and speeds up the review process as you can bypass the redundant content.

  • Contextual Clarity:

    Reviewers reviewing isolated emails breed confusion as they are not able to get the context of content, leaving room for misinterpretation. Email threading groups together emails with the same subject line in a single thread, providing a clear flow that helps in solid understanding and interconnected details in emails. Contextual clarity received by reviewing a single email thread helps in making informed legal decisions.

    Email threading can also identify any emails that are not collected but are part of the conversation. This brings insights to the reviewer or investigator, and possible efforts can be made to collect the missing information for critical evidence.

Let’s have a real-world scenario of email-threading magic!

In a recent live project, applying Email Thread Analysis helped reduce the attorney-review volume of email data by around 20 percent. Ultimately, it saved time and costs in reviewing email data.

Email Thread Analysis eDiscovery Example

In the first step, email data was filtered out from the data source by applying “Document Type” metadata-based searching and filtering.

In the second step, Email Thread Analytics was executed on the email documents (892740) to select only inclusive (unique) emails with attachments. The qualified records (724621) were considered for attorney review.

After performing email thread analytics, approximately 20% of non-inclusive/redundant emails were excluded, resulting in significant cost savings.

Thus, by leveraging email threading, organizations can:

Privilege Log Challenges posed by Email Threading

In spite of the many benefits provided by email threading in eDiscovery, it becomes challenging to generate privilege log reports of withholding documents.

Email threads can pose significant challenges for reviewers from a privileged information perspective. There is still a lot of ambiguity among litigants, courts, and experts over privilege logging on whether to log the entire email thread as one single document or log each email in a thread as one single document.

Proponents of using an email thread as a single document for privilege log compared it with group conversations between participants and attorneys and hence wanted it as the preferred method for privilege logging in email threading. However, the court in In re Universal Service Fund found various differences and strongly encouraged listing each email within an email thread as a separate document for privilege logs.

Still, there is little clarity on how to log email chains for privilege. Many factors, such as costs, financial resources, and discovery deadlines, can affect a decision in this direction. Failure to log each email can result in sanctions on litigants, like compelled production of privileged emails.

Solution: The court can ask parties to form guidelines to produce the most inclusive email threads but also requires the production of email threads consisting of only unique information.

Formulating specific protocols by the court to enforce redaction of privileged portions, exclusion of entire threads containing privileged content, or in-camera review by the judge only to determine privilege can be helpful in identifying the privileged email threads. Clear and upfront communication between the eDiscovery and legal teams in identifying specific keywords, email addresses, and specific receivers or senders helps accurately identify and handle email threads before the threading process.

Email data is an important and most common data type in ESI. Leveraging eDiscovery solutions with built-in email thread analytics can unearth critical information relevant to the case and help you achieve case objectives. Stay tuned for the second article in this series…

The post Email Threading Analysis: An Essential Companion for eDiscovery Reviewers appeared first on Knovos.