The rapid growth of Electronically Stored Information, combined with tighter budgets and Federal regulations, requires counsel to work as efficiently as possible. As a result, an effective data culling strategy is essential to the e-discovery process. Data culling refers to the process of reducing a large document population to a more manageable set. It's estimated that about 90 percent of collected electronic materials can be insignificant, resulting in hours of unnecessary attorney review time. vdiscovery performs deduplication, keyword searching and file filtering services to ultimately reduce client data collections.

Deduplication refers to eliminating duplicate or redundant documents from the collected dataset, resulting in only one instance of the document being presented for review. This technology is extremely significant from a cost-savings point of view, and since deduplication can occur throughout various stages of data processing, the cost savings often applies to many processing stages.

One of the most common culling strategies, keyword filtering, searches for specific keywords throughout the documents collected. Search terms may include the names of custodians and specific keywords that help determine whether the combination is located within the text or metadata of a document. This approach also helps legal teams decrease quantities of records and make the process more manageable. Only those documents containing the keywords are processed and delivered.

Data filtering can narrow a dataset by selecting relevant files based on criteria, such as metadata. The custodian list, file type and time frame associated with the case are all standard criteria. Segregating the operating system files from a source hard drive early in the processing phase can greatly cut down the data set, helping to minimize processing time. Other file types, such as system files, also can be programmatically segregated.