2023: Arkus Project Managers leading the way

In 2023 Arkus project managers led the way for our clients. Each expanded their individual skill sets, and here we reflect and celebrate their achievements. We cannot wait to see what achievements 2024 will bring.

James Lawson, eDiscovery Director, said: “It is a real pleasure to lead a team of such dedicated and talented individuals. How each of our project managers have impacted their clients’ cases is a tribute to them. I see the output of their work every day and these examples are a tiny percentage of the impact which they have had”.

Fernando Moreno

A significant achievement for Fernando this year has been leading a large-scale review consisting of hundreds of thousands of documents and supporting a review team of around 15 reviewers. Throughout this matter, Fernando has primarily used a predictive coding AI feature called CAL (Continuous Active Learning) which learns how documents are likely to be coded and then provides the next most relevant document to the reviewer.

As the name suggests, this process continually learns what documents are most likely to be relevant and - significantly - what documents are most likely to be not relevant. This, in turn, increases the efficiency and accuracy of the review for our clients. The much more challenging question is, when should a client stop their review? This is never an exact science and requires ongoing statistical analysis of the document population.

Collaborating with the client to understand exactly where a safe decision can be made was critical. It was Fernando’s responsibility to be the client's trusted source of understanding. After all, the real test of any process is whether it stands up to real scrutiny and testing from all angles.

Jonnie Greenlees

Jonnie was the lead project manager on a number of complex projects involving analytics.

An example of where analytics has been successfully used is in the identification and translation of foreign language documents. eDiscovery platforms, such as Nuix Discover, are great at identifying highly used languages such as English, German and Chinese to name a few. This language identification is completed automatically with no additional cost during data processing.

Where technology can be less effective is in identifying less commonly spoken languages. It was Jonnie’s years of experience and detailed knowledge of the platform which enabled him to create custom solutions to identify these “non-detectable” languages.

Answering the “why, what and when” for a client is as critical to the overall success of a project as to the “how”. This is one of many clear examples of why Arkus is a consulting company and not a technology company. It is this “non-googleable” knowledge that our customers seek, as opposed to the “cookie-cutter rinse and repeat” model.

Nagaraju Kshirasagar

In addition to his technical prowess (as one of a very select few Relativity Masters), Nagaraju has closely managed clients’ budgets and guided them on choosing the best option for their matter. An example is where we received disclosure of 100,000 documents from our client’s counterparty, as opposed to what was anticipated: 5,000 to 10,000 documents.

Instead of simply loading all 100,000 documents into our eDiscovery platform and burdening the client with a large monthly hosting charge, Nagaraju used his expertise in understanding load files to extract important subsets of documents which the client was primarily interested in. This of course saved the client money, but also made exploring the other side’s disclosure more efficient and manageable, which allowed our client to make significantly quicker decisions based on the received disclosure set.

Proportionality and defensibility are critical in civil cases. Without a constant commitment to ensure that processes and financials are managed closely, eDiscovery matters can become unwieldy and go well beyond the clients’ expectations (in the wrong way!).