Threading the Needle?
What is Email threading?
Email threading is a feature that groups email conversations together based on their metadata such as subject, sender, recipient, message ID and other criteria. This feature determines if an email belongs to the same thread by examining the email headers and email content.
Email threading is a way of reducing the size of a review pool by focusing on the most recent or most inclusive email conversation. This analytics tool is not restricted to document review or disclosure.
Additionally, email threading can help reduce the duplicates emails in your chronological run of documents for trial bundle. Furthermore, email threading works equally well for early stages of getting a structure together of your data set.
How can email threading benefit your disclosure?
Email threading allows fewer documents to be reviewed due to grouping all email relationships into one. This simplifies the review process as the legal teams will only need to read the most recent or most inclusive email chain to review the whole chain. This will greatly reduce the time and complexity of reviewing email threads.
Another advantage of email threading is that there’s more than one way to review and produce email threads. For example, you can choose to review only inclusive threaded emails. This mean that you would only be reviewing the email thread that includes only unique content. Alternatively, reviewers may want to see the full email thread, not just the inclusive emails.
Similarly, depending on your disclosure protocol requirements, you may want to produce entire email thread or only the inclusive emails. XBundle can accommodate both options. However, we would recommend having this discussion and agreeing to a workflow early on in your disclosure.
What are the disadvantages of email threading?
It can be difficult for reviewers to have to read a long thread to decide on relevance of a document. There is a risk that if all the recent messages are irrelevant a reviewer may miss something relevant further down.
Another issue that might arise from email threading is that if the parent email requires redaction, the metadata will have to be changed or time spent going back to source data to find the relevant email lower in the chain.
Legal teams can benefit hugely from using email threading. If you would like more information or any help with your disclosure, contact us at info@xbundle.co.uk or on 0207 871 3125
