Document Hosting & Review

Cornerstone offers a flat-fee eDiscovery software with a relentless focus on speed and ease of use. It is a feature-complete platform for the processing, review, analysis, and production steps of the EDRM.

Our platform is a web-based software that can be used in any modern web browser, including the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox, as well as on mobile devices, including the iPad and other tablets.

Cornerstone users include law firms like K&L Gates, Morgan Lewis, Adams & Reese, Winstead, Gibbs & Bruns, Beck Redden, Diamond McCarthy, Dobrowski, Camara & Sibley, Pierce O’Neill, Stafford Rosenbaum, and Cokinos Bosien & Young, and large corporations like AIG, Cameron, and Westlake Chemical.

 

Processing

Users send native files or scanned images for ingestion and processing either by secure FTP or by sending a physical hard drive containing the data to Cornerstone. No preprocessing or load file is required. Once Cornerstone receives the data, Cornerstone automatically processes and ingests it so that it can be reviewed in Cornerstone.

Our platform supports most common native file formats, including Microsoft Office documents, Outlook email and PST files, Lotus Notes email, and the like as well as all image formats, including TIFF and PDF. The platform also recognizes and unpacks container files such as PDF portfolios and ZIP archives.

Processing includes:

  1. text and metadata extraction;
  2. OCR, including recognizing scans of previously printed email as email;
  3. imaging all documents to PDF to facilitate fast review (instead of imaging on the fly or TIFF on the  fly during review, which can slow down the review process, Cornerstone images all documents up front during ingest)
  4. unpacking and uncompressing container files to arbitrary depth (e.g., a PDF portfolio containing a ZIP file containing four Word documents)
  5. family creation for emails and attachments
  6. conversation creation for emails
  7. time-zone normalization so that documents appear in the correct order to the reviewer
  8. removing system files (“deNISTing”)
  9. detecting duplicates
  10. detecting near duplicates and related documents, for example, multiple drafts of a contract
  11. creating or updating a comprehensive search index and review database
  12. generating an ingest report providing statistics about the data that was processed and identifying files that could not be processed (for example, because they are password-protected and the password was not supplied) or that are missing (for example, emails collected without the corresponding attachments).

All processing features are handled automatically by Cornerstone and are included for every case at no additional charge.

By default, processing occurs at a speed of about 50,000 documents (not pages) per hour. But processing is fully parallelized, meaning that Cornerstone automatically breaks large data sets up across multiple machines working at the same time. By adding machines to a particular processing job, Cornerstone can make processing of even terabytes of data arbitrarily fast.

 

Fast, Focused eDiscovery

Cornerstone’s competitive advantage is its relentless focus on speed and ease of use for the features that reviewers and litigation teams use most.

Cornerstone offers the simplest and fastest way to search, review, tag, and produce documents, giving access to all this functionality through three easy-to-understand screens and leveraging lawyers’ existing familiarity with services like Westlaw and Lexis. Search and document navigation speeds in the platform are literally 10x faster than competitors (e.g., 1/3 of a second search v. 3 – 4 second search; 1/10 of a second document navigation v. 1 – 2 second document navigation) providing a more efficient and enjoyable review experience.

Our platform has been successfully used in litigation in state and federal courts around the country and in connection with investigations by or productions to government agencies like the SEC