LegalTech / Regulated eDiscovery
Regulated eDiscovery data ingestion
Ingestion, validation, and records reconciliation for litigation and investigation datasets that had to hold up as evidence.
Context
An AI-powered eDiscovery, FOIA, and compliance platform, authorized for DoD IL6 and FedRAMP. Its customers were law firms, enterprise organizations, and regulators, and its work was litigation support and investigations: collecting the records those matters turned on.
The defining constraint was not accuracy. It was defensibility. An ingested dataset that is subtly incomplete is more dangerous than one that visibly failed, because nothing downstream can tell the difference until someone with standing challenges it.
Challenge
Litigation and investigation datasets arrive large, from multiple sources, in inconsistent file types. Each ingestion pass could produce exceptions, metadata problems, duplicates, or processing discrepancies, and every one of them was a hole in a record that would be argued over.
The failure mode was quiet. A pipeline that dropped a custodian’s files or mis-mapped a date would run to completion and produce a result that looked complete. So the work was not getting data in — it was being able to say, for any given dataset, what arrived, what was processed, and what did not reconcile.
Approach
Ingestion ran through the platform’s native tooling with SQL alongside it, rather than through anything purpose-built for the engagement — the job was verification and reconciliation, not construction.
Validation, metadata verification, and processing checks ran at ingest, so problems surfaced while the dataset was still fixable rather than after review had started. SQL was then used to investigate data issues, validate ingestion results, and reconcile records across multiple sources and file types.
Ingestion exceptions, metadata problems, duplicates, and processing discrepancies were resolved explicitly rather than carried forward. Delivery ran through an 8-member team, with the work done directly alongside stakeholders at law firms, enterprise organizations, and regulators.
native tooling Validate
records Reconcile
sources Defensible
dataset
Result
$1M+ eDiscovery engagements supported by an 8-member delivery team, with each dataset validated, metadata-verified, and reconciled before it went to review — datasets that held up downstream and in discovery, which is the only standard that counts when the record is being contested.