Alston Discovery

The Alston & Bird Advantage

The typical e-discovery process is inefficient, and you may feel forced to choose between quality and cost. Teams of temporary reviewers are hired with varying experience. They may review and code documents quickly (if not accurately) to hit deadlines and targets. These temporary lawyers are released once the document review is over and have moved on to other assignments long before the depositions or trial begins. While this staffing process can lower costs in the short term, the variability in quality and the loss of case knowledge means documents may have to be re-reviewed by different teams, repeatedly and often at higher rates. Furthermore, on the next case, a brand-new temporary team comes in and starts from scratch. This ramp-up to learn about your business for each new matter is expensive and inefficient. 

Our approach is different: On all our projects, Alston Discovery utilizes the latest technology at no added charge to you so that there is no cost barrier to using every tool to streamline the review. Our staffing is also designed to ensure quality from the start and “bake in” knowledge retention. We select a core team of professionals with the best experience and skills to work on all your matters. These review attorneys and technology professionals form your dedicated Core Discovery Team and support your matter for the life of the case, reducing the need for costly re-review. After the case is resolved, your Core Discovery Team is ready to tackle your next case and apply what they learned with no expensive ramp-up. Our goal is to acquire extensive knowledge of your business and become adept in your data sets and apply it to your cases. With our focus on efficiency and quality, Alston Discovery is uniquely positioned to serve as your e-discovery team across your entire litigation portfolio, whether or not Alston & Bird is serving as merits counsel on any specific matter. 

We believe you shouldn’t have to choose between lowering your cost or having confidence in the quality of your discovery process. Our mission is to partner with you to deliver better results, drive budget predictability, and help you manage complexity with confidence. 

Because of the depth and breadth of Alston & Bird’s litigation and investigations practices, Alston Discovery has provided document review and analysis support on commercial litigation matters, construction disputes, environmental matters, ITC claims, patent infringement disputes, bankruptcy proceedings, and internal investigations.

• Data Breaches: Developed an efficient protocol for conducting fast-response analysis in data breach matters for several entities that have experienced data breaches, collaborating with our privacy and cybersecurity lawyers to rapidly assess client risk, evaluate the impact on customers, and develop reports to law enforcement agencies, shareholders, and other parties.
• Products Liability Defense: Served as defense counsel to Japanese and European car manufacturers in some of the most significant class action and multidistrict litigation matters in the U.S., including the Toyota Unintended Acceleration MDL, Takata Airbag MDL, and VW Clean Diesel Emissions MDL. These matters included significant cross-border discovery elements, including support for document reviews both inside and outside the U.S. and in multiple foreign languages.
• Antitrust Price Fixing/Technology: Supported the antitrust litigation team in recovering billions of dollars for our clients in a series of antitrust price-fixing cases alleging that foreign companies paid their suppliers to artificially hide prices for computer component parts. Over the course of the varied litigations, Alston Discovery analyzed terabytes of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese documents in preparation for more than 500 depositions conducted around the world.
• Criminal and Private Cartel Defense/Agriculture: Supported the firm’s role as lead counsel to a top producer of broiler chickens against antitrust claims alleging a conspiracy to manipulate supply and price indexes. Alston Discovery effectively employed state-of-the-art continuous active learning technology to quickly locate, analyze, and escalate to merits counsel the most critical electronic data at an early stage in the litigation. This strategy facilitated a robust and fact-based early case assessment, which led to early bargain settlements with two of the three classes.
• Private Cartel Defense/Insurance: Supporting the firm’s representation of a major insurance carrier in more than 20 antitrust cases alleging a conspiracy to fix labor and material rates and boycott noncomplying auto body shops. We developed and carried out a detailed, proactive e-discovery strategy that utilized multiple advanced analytics and augmented intelligence tools to reduce the volume of data for review and analysis and efficiently find and synthesize the most critical data at an early stage. We developed and maintained a detailed defensibility manual documenting each step of the e-discovery strategy and armed our antitrust merits team with specific and fact-based arguments against the plaintiffs’ overly burdensome and disproportionate discovery demands.
• Bankruptcy Litigation: Served as the court-appointed Examiner in the Enron bankruptcy litigation, which required the review of hundreds of thousands of documents to identify critical materials for interviews, litigation, and ultimately the Examiner’s report to Congress. The Enron document review is often used by the ESI industry as the touchstone case for electronic discovery matters.
• Trial Assistance: Assisted with hundreds of individual trials across the U.S. by reviewing, categorizing, and classifying decades’ worth of documents, providing deposition assistance, drafting specific-subject memos, and other trial preparation support as counsel for various clients in asbestos litigation.
• Corporate Transactions: Provided assistance for a wide range of financial and investment institutions in reviewing documents and preparing timelines and depositions to respond to SEC subpoenas, FINRA requests, compliance initiatives, and shareholder litigation.