Fully flexible with text-only

Let’s skip the scoping calls, collections and meetings for this blog post; our starting point is a database filled with tens of thousands of files and the document review is about to commence. The data processing, which takes up most of the initial costs, already happened. The next expenditure on technology that clients will encounter is hosting costs and although they look smaller than the processing costs, these costs are not to be underestimated. If the investigation takes a month or two longer than expected; more often than not the hosting fees will catch up on the initial processing fees.

This can change now.

In a database each document can be uploaded in three different formats; text, native and tiff image. Each format provides the reviewer with a unique set of tools such as machine translation, predictive coding, redactions and the ability to create productions. These three formats all contribute to the total volume of hosted data and thus to hosting costs.

Data Volumes

As stated above each document format brings something unique to the table, but these tools are not always needed, especially in the early phases of a document review. Clients often have to collect large amounts of data to ensure critical information is not left out. The next step is to cull the data as much as possible. Redactions and productions are not needed at this point in time and the text-only format will give the reviewer all the information and tools needed in order to establish if a document is relevant or not. During this initial phase of the investigation the native and tiff images sit there in the database taking up server space and increase the hosting costs unnecessarily.

Kroll Ontrack now offers its clients a more flexible approach. Clients can choose to initially upload only the text format when setting up a database. This will drastically decrease the hosting volumes and thus the hosting costs. In a later stage of the review and native or tiff image formats are needed, they can be requested on the fly within the database. The result is that clients will only pay for the documents and formats they are actually using.