Documents for You to Review to Help Understand the Process

5 Steps That Will Rejuvenate Your Document Review Process

This post was originally published past D4, an Orangish-level Relativity Best in Service Partner. It explains five steps that will prevent excess review costs, improve overall efficiency, and maintain defensible protocols for a repeatable process, and was co-authored by Chad Jones and Chuck Kellner.

"Bustle up and load the data. The contract attorneys are coming!"

Accept you heard this earlier?

Possibly you lot're the one who said information technology. Maybe it was your exterior counsel.

How oft have you dived headlong into a review with no more plan than this: "First, we'll review information technology. Then nosotros'll review information technology once again for QC and produce it."

All of usa know that the average size of e-discovery projects continues to expand. Courts are imposing shorter deadlines. Cost-witting clients want the all-time possible rates for their review.

Yous're about to brainstorm what is arguably the most of import and expensive office of discovery, the review for responsiveness and privilege. Because that review is costly, it drives your assessment of whether to litigate or settle. Because that review contains evidence, it drives what y'all tin can utilize for claims, defenses, depositions, and trial. Because that review contains sensitive communications, information technology bears the adventure of exposing privileged or confidential information.

These are reasons Non to dive in. These are reasons to rejuvenate your review. What practise we mean by that?

1. Get a Fresh Starting time

Until now you've been busy learning almost your case—interviews, negotiations, briefings, and arguments. Focus now on what you desire from the review.

• What information is truly relevant and responsive?
• What kinds of documents are important?
• Would you expect what is of import to vary amidst custodians?
• Do you lot have priorities for review and production?
• Do you have a budget or a deadline?
• Take you thought about how your quality control and technology volition fit into it?

If you are the client who pays the bills, make certain that your legal team tin respond these questions earlier starting the review. If you lot are part of the paralegal or technology support squad, get these questions in front of the lead attorneys.

ii. Employ Your Expertise

Meet with your technology experts as total members of the review team. Talk virtually your case and your concerns regarding time and price. The team will help plan, staff, quantify, budget, document, and report. They will aid to filter out the kinds of documents you don't need to review. Some of these filters operate past engagement, past blazon of document, by email domain, past custodian, or past keyword or phrase to help find responsive or potentially privileged documents. Likewise, the aforementioned kind of filters, with highlighting, can help to prioritize and focus your review.

three. Leverage The Technology

Any difficult, time-consuming, or expensive task will ultimately yield a applied science solution to make information technology become improve, faster, and cheaper. This is certainly the case with e-discovery. Talk over at to the lowest degree these three technology-assisted review (TAR) tools with your client and technology experts:

• Predictive Coding leverages the talent and knowledge of the squad's best and about experienced reviewers to rank documents from well-nigh likely to least probable responsive. The technologies include concept-based searching, statistical sampling, and algorithms to identify similar documents. Predictive coding dramatically decreases review of non-responsive documents. It contributes to quality, speed, consistency, and price direction.
• Electronic mail Bulletin Threading groups together the messages that are all role of the aforementioned conversation in emails. This grouping of messages, forward, and replies can present the reviewer with the longest and most inclusive email for review offset, avoiding the redundant and unnecessary review of the component emails of the thread. Savings in review time have been estimated at 30-40 percent.
• Near-duplicate Detection helps group together for review documents and messages with similar content. Unlike email threading, the squad can "dial in" what degree of similarity is desirable for grouping together for review.

These technologies are all well-established, defensible, and approved by the courts. Practical properly, they help reviewers to batch and evaluate similar content at in one case. They leverage your smarts into a review that is faster and of higher quality than you lot tin perform otherwise.

4. Empathize The Costs

Your experts volition explain how the costs of technology provide a return on investment in speed and savings in review. They can also introduce y'all to the real-time dashboards and reports that help you monitor your rates of review, your "burn rate" against the budget, and your estimated time to completion. All of these factors contribute to your existence able to explicate how much the review volition cost and how effectively the money is spent.

5. Document and Report

Certificate your plan and budget. Make sure it contains plans for how technology will exist used, how documents will exist grouped and batched, and in what order you program to review them. Include descriptions of what filters yous used to exclude or prioritize particular documents. Describe how you lot will evaluate and monitor for quality and consistency. Identify who will support technical and substantive grooming and troubleshooting and for what days and hours. Build in time limits for your diverse productions, so that the quality plan is fully executed and the team has time to format and quality-check the product itself.

Refer to your documentation ofttimes. Add to information technology questions asked and answered and the exemplars or other documents you have used to train your reviewers. Accept yous fabricated any changes to the content of the review? If and so, practise you need to employ those changes to documents already reviewed? Frequent reference to your programme will assist you avoid advertizement hoc decisions that could injure your budget or your borderline.

Meet routinely with your review team, your technology experts, and your client to walk through the program and the progress reports. Are you on runway for budget and deadline? As the review progresses, the reviewers volition become more than experienced with what documents are or are non of import. Your technology team tin employ that feedback to reapply or refine filters to further enhance quality and efficiency.

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Chad is a consultant on D4's professional services team, sharing his insight into workflow and best practices subsequently over a decade of due east-discovery projection management experience.

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Source: https://www.relativity.com/blog/5-steps-that-will-rejuvenate-your-document-review-process/

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