How Twilio saved $360K and thousands of hours by handling discovery in-house

As one of the world’s leading customer engagement platforms, Twilio leverages the power of the cloud to enable personalized interactions and trusted global communications via web service APIs.

With more than 7,600 employees and a service available in more than 150 countries, the company is transforming customer experiences for organizations big and small across the globe.

But Twilio’s disruptive and cloud-oriented spirit is not exclusive to the product and development teams. It’s embedded into every function within the organization, including their innovative legal team, which has jettisoned a time- and resource-intensive discovery process dependent on outside counsel and off-the-shelf tools for a streamlined approach that yields six-figure annual savings.

Moving From Collection to Production 3x Faster

As in most tech companies, Twilio’s internal toolset is largely cloud-based: Slack, Gmail, Google Docs, and the like. So, when a dispute or investigation arises, these are the data sources Matt Gainer, Senior Manager of Litigation at Twilio, and his team need to preserve, collect, search and produce. And they need to do it fast.

Until two years ago, the team — comprised of Gainer, two paralegals, and a litigator — conducted discovery primarily in Google Vault, relying on that tool for early case assessment and document review, though finding the specificity of its search features to be lacking. The team would use Vault to take a broad first cut at the data thought to be relevant. It would then spend hours exporting that data before sending it to outside counsel, whom Twilio involved in more than half of its matters.

One particularly large case involving thousands of emails from Gmail prompted Twilio to look for alternatives. The team realized it would be impossible to quickly grasp the nature of the case without a proper platform to process, organize and analyze data from Google Vault. To get a granular view of the facts in Vault would’ve required a manual review of email and hundreds of hours, the team estimated.

“There’s only so much you can do within Google Vault to reduce data volumes. There are some okay ways to search, but getting a granular view of your data is what we were lacking. By taking Vault data out and putting it into Logikcull, we reduced our overall data volumes significantly.”
Matthew Gainer
Senior Manager, Litigation at Twilio

That’s exactly what brought them to Logikcull.

Following some of his peers’ recommendations, Gainer requested a demo of Logikcull’s discovery platform to assess if it would be the right fit for Twilio’s needs. Less than 24 hours later, he was in the platform and reviewing email.

“To get it up and running with very little training and very little maintenance or administration after that was very appealing to me.”
Matthew Gainer
Senior Manager, Litigation at Twilio

By leveraging Logikcull’s direct Google Vault integration, Gainer and his team now collect Google data with just a few clicks, saving an estimated four-to-five hours on each data pull. For other data types, like Slack conversations, they just drag and drop their files directly into the platform.

From there, Logikcull automatically deduplicates, indexes, organizes, and makes searchable documents of all kinds, allowing the team to easily filter down data by dozens of criteria and run searches against the paired-down results.

This powerful culling and filtering yields data reduction of 50 to 70% on average prior to document review, which in turn enables the team to conduct the review and complete productions entirely by themselves. Outside counsel is no longer needed for most matters.

“We see data reductions of 50-60% on average prior to doc review. They can get as high as 70% in some cases. That’s because we’re able to easily pinpoint non-relevant data and cull it.”
Matthew Gainer
Senior Manager, Litigation at Twilio

This allows Twilio’s team to move much faster — especially in high-velocity matters and investigations, where they can get started in minutes and go from collection to production 75% faster than before.

Developing a More Agile, Cost-Efficient Discovery Process—and a Better Relationship with OC

With Logikcull, Twilio’s team has developed the internal bandwidth to handle most of their discovery projects internally — without having to add head count or resources.

By integrating the discovery platform with their main data sources and leveraging its processing and review capabilities, the team has become more independent and agile and has been able to save 1,470 hours and $360K to date in unnecessary external legal costs.

However, for those matters that do require OC’s intervention, Twilio’s team is now also observing an improved relationship with their outside counsel. By inviting them to conduct the document review inside of Logikcull, they have found a more effective and transparent way to collaborate in real-time, which keeps both parties more aligned toward their common goals.

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