U.S. Department of Justice’s Cloud Open Base Review Analytics System (COBRA) Litigation Support System

July 12, 2019

AITHERAS supported the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) under their MEGA 4 contract as subcontractor. The MEGA 4 contract is a $1.6B contract supporting the Department’s Litigation requirements. Automated litigation support encompasses a wide range of professional services and products that help attorneys acquire, organize, develop, and present evidence throughout the course of litigation, from pre-filing investigation, through complaint, discovery, and trial, through post-trial briefs and the appeals process. The types of litigation support required under this contract will generally fall into the following areas: (1) Document acquisition; (2) Database creation; (3) Database utilization; (4) Electronic data acquisition and production; (5) Pre-trial and trial support; (6) Resource planning, implementation, and administration; (7) Specialized professional services; (8) Contract and project management; and (9) Legal support. DOJ currently has litigation support programs in seven of its litigating components - Civil Division, Antitrust Division, Civil Rights Division, Criminal Division, Environment and Natural Resources Division, Tax Division, and the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. All seven existing programs consist of Government specialists who define case-specific or investigation-specific requirements and then manage contractor-provided case support using contracts designed for automated litigation support.

For this tasking, AITHERAS was responsible for the architecture, design, implementation, deployment, and the technical and user training of the DOJ’s next generation Litigation Support/eDiscovery Analytics System. We developed a federal record and eDiscovery management application which supports the entire litigation work flow from investigation, record identification and classification, to legal hold, litigation and e-discovery processing, production and trial presentation in a complete Open Source Environment.  The DOJ Cloud Open Base Review Analytics (COBRA) Litigation Support system decreases the complexity of collecting content, managing discovery and records, allows the litigation team to search, review, organize, produce and share litigation documents (scanned paper, email and other e-discovery) generated during discovery. The COBRA system is architected to provide efficient methods of data ingestion, collection, management and storage. 

COBRA provides solutions for the ingestion of raw data objects in bulk and stream creating usable data collections for the investigation and litigation workflow.  COBRA is architected to provide scalability and high speed processing allowing the processing of up to 20 Petabytes of data annually. The COBRA project is designed to ingest/produce 12 – 15 Terabytes of data per day and to process and store up to 40 Petabyte of active data within the cluster. This system will support over 500+ attorneys and 250+ support staff across the United States in over 100+ geographical locations.