The process where risk in terms of time and finances is estimated for the prosecution or defense of a legal case is known as early case assessment. Global organizations deal with legal discovery and disclosure requests for electronically stored information (ESI) via e-discovery and documents on a regular basis.

More than 90% of cases tend to settle before trial. An organization may find the need or want for case settlement for some reason, but regret the fact that so many resources in terms of time and money was spent on the case. The Legal discovery costs are often the heaviest for both the defendant and the plaintiff.

Several cases, and for those in the United States, have the opposing party formulating a strategy making it difficult in the extreme for the other party to go along with the discovery process, along with the same for the time and response costs of discovery requests. This leads to a continued need for early case assessment to extract the risks and benefits of proceeding to trial without hurtful settlement discussions.

A large number of service organizations, law firms, and corporations refer to early case assessment differently. Numerous software-based tools are available, but most software companies tend to claim that their software directly provides early case assessment. Cases are managed on the basis of risk by consultants, also known as experts, who are hired by a corporation or law firm.

Early case assessment is a managed process that has to be properly customized for each particular case and the client involved. It does not occur that the process is manageable by a single software with restricted or no professionally managed process. E-discovery software, nevertheless, plays an important part of the process.

The early case assessment lifecycle covers: 1. Finding the risk of case win/lose; 2. Placing a legal hold on potentially responsive documents (paper and ESI); 3. Preserve information abroad; 4. Collecting germane information for attorney and expert document review; 5. Processing potentially relevant information for purposes of filtering, search term, or data analytics; 6. Information hosting for attorney and expert document review, commenting, redaction; 7. Production of documents to parties in the case; 8. Reuse of information for future cases.

Early case assessment is the process used in litigation where risk is assessed in terms of cost of time and money for the prosecution or defense of a legal case.

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