Content-Centric e-Mail Message Analysis in Litigation Document Reviews

Grouping e-mail messages based on message text, rather than traditional metadata information, is a strategy that legal teams should strongly consider when organizing document reviews. Though it is a relatively new approach, benefits may be striking. First, because related messages will be reviewed by a single reviewer, the resulting analysis is more comprehensive than traditional reviews that scatter related information across multiple review batches and reviewers. Second, the reconstruction of the e-mail thread based on content dramatically increases review speed because the reviewer can focus exclusively on the last e-mail message in a thread. Content-centric analysis of the thread ensures that the last e-mail message does in fact quote all the previous layers of the conversation.