Administrative Records (ARs) are a critical element when it comes to substantiating the decisions of a federal agency. ARs give citizens and government officials access to the full range of information required to understand the agency’s decision-making process. The AR is an evidentiary trail that documents the basis for the agency’s proposed action. Done right, ARs can help to keep agencies out of litigation or, where litigation is inevitable, help make the agency’s position clear. Done poorly, ARs can undermine agency decisions and delay proposed actions. ViewDox Discovery’s Capabilities ViewDox has over a decade of extensive technical and project management experience working with federal agencies to prepare organized and defensible ARs. Over time, we have developed processes and documented leading practices concerning the compilation of ARs. Our goal is to efficiently produce a clean, accurate AR that represents and supports the agency’s decision-making process. ViewDox Discovery’s
Administrative Records Services
ViewDox Discovery’s Administrative Records Services
We offer comprehensive, flexible solutions that can be tailored to the individual needs of your agency. Specifically, we:
• have the knowledge and experience to locate the sources and types of data needed for your AR
• understand how to identify relevant information within the data set,
• prepare the information in a manner that protects agency privileges and sensitive data
• organize voluminous records to produce a complete, orderly, and defensible AR. Identifying Sources and Collecting
Data We have considerable experience in identifying sources and collecting the requisite data needed to produce an AR. We help you identify the proper custodians and collect your data to prepare, process, and produce your AR. For instance, in support of a recent effort, ViewDox collected 60,000 documents from 200 custodians located in 20 different sites, coordinated the processing of the data, and shepherded the AR through the entire process. We were able to substantially reduce the expansive document set producing only 6,000 documents for a certified AR in six months. Unfortunately, extraneous circumstances often dictate a more complicated collection effort. For instance, custodians are frequently under tremendous time pressure or might no longer be employed by the agency. When this happens, our clients need us to filter through all of the custodian’s data to find what is relevant to the specific AR at hand, and ViewDox is well-equipped to do so. For example, one federal custodian was under such scheduling pressures that, in order to capture relevant documents for the AR, ViewDox had to collect more than 10,000 e-mails. We extracted and analyzed relevant metadata from these e-mails and transformed the data into a digestible format to present to the client. We then worked together to identify potentially relevant documents and cull out the remaining extraneous e-mails. Culling and Processing ViewDox’s Discovery practice has also come in after collection to process and cull massive amounts of data in order to efficiently review, organize, and produce a complete and properly scoped AR. For example, one federal agency required us to load, process, and review 190GB of data constituting more than 555,000 documents in an extremely compressed timeframe. Our experienced teams, empowered with the full resources of ViewDox, used advanced technology to substantially reduce the data set prior to review. Upon load, we leveraged our past experience with ARs to identify common extraneous documents for their immediate removal. We then ran data analytics to further eliminate non-relevant documents. Ultimately, we were able toreduce the data set to less than 40,000 documents. This meant that less time was spent coding, reviewing, and redacting, saving precious time and resources for our client. After culling down the document universe, we worked with agency stakeholders to formulate a custom relevancy search, which further removed almost 19,000 documents as non-relevant. Once the document universe was set, we coded the documents, providing a snapshot of the AR as it existed at that moment. We then presented the snapshot to the client, and worked with them to shape our next steps for the final AR. After coding, we worked with our client to formulate an effective and efficient review of the data. Our experienced teams, empowered with the full resources of ViewDox, use advanced technology to substantially reduce the data set prior to review.
Administrative Records (ARs) are a critical element when it comes to substantiating the decisions of a federal agency. ARs give citizens and government officials access to the full range of information required to understand the agency’s decision-making process. The AR is an evidentiary trail that documents the basis for the agency’s proposed action. Done right, ARs can help to keep agencies out of litigation or, where litigation is inevitable, help make the agency’s position clear. Done poorly, ARs can undermine agency decisions and delay proposed actions.
ViewDox Discovery’s Capabilities
ViewDox has over a decade of extensive technical and project management experience working with federal agencies to prepare organized and defensible ARs. Over time, we have developed processes and documented leading practices concerning the compilation of ARs. Our goal is to efficiently produce a clean, accurate AR that represents and supports the agency’s decision-making process.
ViewDox Discovery’s
Administrative Records Services
ViewDox Discovery’s Administrative Records Services
We offer comprehensive, flexible solutions that can be tailored to the individual needs of your agency. Specifically, we:
• have the knowledge and experience to locate the sources and types of data needed for your AR
• understand how to identify relevant information within the data set,
• prepare the information in a manner that protects agency privileges and sensitive data
• organize voluminous records to produce a complete, orderly, and defensible AR. Identifying Sources and Collecting
Data We have considerable experience in identifying sources and collecting the requisite data needed to produce an AR. We help you identify the proper custodians and collect your data to prepare, process, and produce your AR. For instance, in support of a recent effort, ViewDox collected 150,000 documents from 180 custodians located in 15 different sites, coordinated the processing of the data, and shepherded the AR through the entire process. We were able to substantially reduce the expansive document set producing only 12,000 documents for a certified AR in six months. Unfortunately, extraneous circumstances often dictate a more complicated collection effort. For instance, custodians are frequently under tremendous time pressure or might no longer be employed by the agency. When this happens, our clients need us to filter through all of the custodian’s data to find what is relevant to the specific AR at hand, and ViewDox is well-equipped to do so.
For example, one federal custodian was under such scheduling pressures that, in order to capture relevant documents for the AR, ViewDox had to collect more than 20,000 e-mails. We extracted and analyzed relevant metadata from these e-mails and transformed the data into a digestible format to present to the client. We then worked together to identify potentially relevant documents and cull out the remaining extraneous e-mails. Culling and Processing ViewDox’s Discovery practice has also come in after collection to process and cull massive amounts of data in order to efficiently review, organize, and produce a complete and properly scoped AR. For example, one federal agency required us to load, process, and review 380GB of data constituting more than 875,000 documents in an extremely compressed timeframe.
Our experienced teams, empowered with the full resources of ViewDox, used advanced technology to substantially reduce the data set prior to review. Upon load, we leveraged our past experience with ARs to identify common extraneous documents for their immediate removal. We then ran data analytics to further eliminate non-relevant documents. Ultimately, we were able to reduce the data set to less than 65,000 documents. This meant that less time was spent coding, reviewing, and redacting, saving precious time and resources for our client.
After culling down the document universe, we worked with agency stakeholders to formulate a custom relevancy search, which further removed almost 28,000 documents as non-relevant. Once the document universe was set, we coded the documents, providing a snapshot of the AR as it existed at that moment. We then presented the snapshot to the client, and worked with them to shape our next steps for the final AR. After coding, we worked with our client to formulate an effective and efficient review of the data. Our experienced teams, empowered with the full resources of ViewDox, use advanced technology tosubstantially reduce the data set prior to review.
Our approach was to collaborate up front with the client to formulate a customized review, avoiding issues and duplicative efforts. We leveraged our past experiences and tailored our standard privilege and Privacy Act search terms to this specific AR. We then ran a single review for relevance and privilege, streamlining the process and reducing redundancy. For another federal agency, ViewDox applied a custom solution involving data analytics and manual review to cull the AR document universe by over 82%. Upon loading files into our secure Web-hosted environment, we were able to automatically remove two-thirds of the documents by identifying exact and near duplicates. Our review team, led by a Project Manager experienced with ARs, implemented our demonstrated methodologies to cull another 12 % of the documents out of the universe. We then coded and reviewed the documents for privilege and Privacy Act issues.
Organizing, Indexing, and Producing the AR ViewDox understands the tremendous importance of producing an organized and complete AR that strikes the proper balance between disclosure and the protection of privilege and private information. We have extensive experience organizing, redacting and indexing our client’s data in order to produce a certifiable AR. In over a decade of compiling ARs for a large federal agency, ViewDox Discovery often takes fragmentary core, reference, and correspondence documents and weaves them back together to create a defensible AR.
We collaborate with agency attorneys in order to help ensure completeness, chronological accuracy, and accurate productions. Producing documents correctly means that the information contained in the AR can be easily located. For one federal agency, we created a privilege log and chronological index. Running parallel work streams with our experienced staff saved time without sacrificing quality, allowing us to deliver a ready-to-go certified AR in 60 days. ViewDox Discovery has the knowledge and experience to assist our clients in every stage of the AR production process. More importantly, we have the capability and resources to shoulder the most onerous aspects of compiling and producing ARs, allowing agencies to refocus their effort and resources toward their most important objectives – executing their statutory missions and promulgating and enforcing transparent, effective regulations.