Time Warner Engages Clearwell to Handle Its E-Discovery Processes

Time Warner, one of the world's largest communications companies, won't have to hire outside firms to handle its in-house legal discovery duties anymore. As of Feb. 1, that job now goes to e-discovery automation software specialist Clearwell Systems.

Time Warner's new package will enable the conglomerate to accelerate its early-case assessment and nonlinear review processes, which in turn will lower its overall legal expenses. This is because the company won't need to hire a service provider to provide law clerks at several hundred dollars per hour to sift through mountains of e-mail, chat records, documents, log files, and video and audio files to find documents in its system required by courts.

Automated e-discovery in general also reduces risk because the element of human error is left out of the equation. Mountain View, Calif.-based Clearwell uses its own multifaceted search mechanism that uses several criteria-including keywords, dates, names, inference and word patterns-to find electronic documents needed for litigation.

Clearwell E-Discovery Platform comprises several modules. The Processing and Analysis Module provides features such as Transparent Search, discussion threads and people analytics that enable users to accelerate early-case assessment, defensibly eliminate irrelevant documents and false positives, and rapidly perform a first-pass review, Clearwell Vice President of Products and Marketing Kamal Shah told eWEEK.

The Review and Production Module enables reviewers to view all related documents in context, perform one-click tagging, redact documents and apply reason codes, increasing review throughput and consistency, Shah said.

Responsive documents can be produced or seamlessly uploaded into litigation support databases via EDRM-compliant XML and other major load file formats. In addition, the Clearwell E-Discovery Platform automatically tracks all actions on case documents throughout the e-discovery workflow, which ensures a defensible e-discovery process, Shah said.

Earlier this year, Clearwell announced that it expanded its platform to cover all major enterprise content management systems.