Project Management

 

Before assembling the review team, think through how the project will be structured.  This will drive decisions on the type of people that you’ll need.  Your goal is to get the work done as cost effectively as possible – using less expensive personnel where possible — without sacrificing work quality or the utility of the work product.

The “base” of the project will be comprised of contract reviewers and qc staff.  In the project plan, you determined the number of people that you need.  At this point, don’t worry about who will be a reviewer and who will do qc work.  Everybody can start as a reviewer.  After a few days, you can identify who will do qc work.  You’ve got options for assembling this staff, but you should consider working with a litigation support vendor who offers staffing services.  A good vendor already has access to a pool of people with document review experience.  This can save you lots of time and work.

In addition to the contract review staff, you’ll need project management staff.  We’ve already talked about a project manager.  For a large project, you’ll want project supervisors — each responsible for a team of reviewers/qc personnel.  Each supervisor is responsible for overseeing the flow of work to the team, the quality of the work done by the team, the productivity of team members, and answering questions raised by reviewers (or ensuring that questions are resolved).  I usually create teams of 10 to 12 and assign one supervisor to a team.   The supervisors might be law firm litigation support professionals, or supervisory staff provided by the vendor with whom you are working.

You’ll also need “decision makers” and experts in the subject matter to round out the team.  At a minimum, you’ll want an attorney from the litigation team.  Depending on the complexity of the documents, you might need a client employee who is familiar with the company’s operations and documents.  These people should be on-site, full-time for the first few days of a project.  Eventually there will be fewer questions and it’s probably sufficient to have phone access to these team members.

Later in this blog series we’ll talk about how these staff levels interact so that decisions are made by attorneys but effectively implemented by review staff.

How do you structure a document review team?  Please share any comments you have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

Before starting a review project, prepare a plan that will be your map for moving forward and that you’ll use to monitor progress throughout the project.  The components of the plan should include:

• A schedule:  The schedule will be dictated by the date on which you’re required to produce documents.  Determine when you can start  (you’ll need time in advance to assemble the team, draft criteria, train the team, and get documents loaded into the review tool).  Plan to complete the project well in advance of the production deadline, so you’ve got some pad for schedule slippage.  Once you have a start date and an end date, look at the size of the collection and calculate how many documents you need to process in a day. 
• Identify required staff resources:  Determine the number of units a reviewer can do in a day (use statistics from prior projects or do test runs on a sampling of the collection).  From there, do the math to determine how many reviewers you’ll need to complete the project within your schedule.  Add in people to do quality control (a good ratio is 1 qc reviewer for every 4 or 5 reviewers).
• A budget:  Include costs for review/qc staff, project management, equipment, and any other incidentals.
• Prepare a monitoring plan:  Every day you should look at the progress that the review team is making so you’ll know where you stand with schedule and budget.  You’ll need reports that provide statistics on what has been completed – reports that can probably be generated by the review tool.  Look at those reports to determine if they will meet your needs or if you’ll need to establish additional tracking mechanisms.
• Prepare a quality control plan:  Determine how reviewed documents will be funneled to the quality control staff, the mechanism by which quality control reviewers will report findings to project management, and the mechanism by which feedback will be provided to reviewers.

A good plan isn’t hard to prepare and it can make a world of difference in how smoothly the project will run.

How do you plan a document review?  Have you run into glitches?  Please share any comments you have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

Yesterday, we covered drafting criteria for responsiveness.  You may, however, be asking the review team to do more than identify responsive documents.  You might, for example, also ask them to identify privileged documents, significant documents, documents that need to be redacted, documents that need to be reviewed by an expert, and so on.  In this issue, we’ll talk about reviewing for privilege.

First, let’s clarify what you’ll be asking the review team to do.  If you are using a team of contract reviewers, it is unlikely that you’ll be asking them to make privilege decisions.  You might, however, ask them to identify and flag potentially privileged documents.  Under this approach, attorneys on your team who can make privilege decisions would do a subsequent review of the potentially privileged documents.  That’s when privilege decisions will be made.

Of course, you’ll need to give the contract team criteria for potentially privileged materials.  Consider including these information points and instructions in the criteria:

• The names and initials of individual attorneys, both outside counsel and corporate in-house attorneys.
• The names and initials of legal assistants and other litigation team members of outside counsel and the corporate legal department (work done by these individuals under the direction of counsel may be privileged).
• The names of law firms that have served as outside counsel.
• Documents on law firm letterhead.
• Documents stamped “Work Product”, “Attorney Client”, “Privileged” or other designations indicating confidentiality re litigation.
• Legal documents such as pleadings or briefs in draft form.
• Handwritten annotations on documents that may be authored by counsel or litigation team members under the direction of counsel.
• Subject areas of privileged communication.

In addition, provide instructions for documents that will not be privileged.  In every collection, there will be certain types of documents that won’t be privileged unless they bear privileged annotations.  Examples are published literature, press releases, advertisements, corporate annual reports, brochures, user manuals…  in short, any documents that are public in nature.  These materials won’t be privileged unless they bear privileged annotations.  Likewise, most document collections will include internal documents that will fall into the same category.  Examples may be insurance policies, invoices, manufacturing reports, and so on.  Create a list of these documents and include them in the criteria instructions.

Have you drafted criteria for a privilege review of a large collection?  How did you approach it and how well did it work?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

The criteria that you prepare for the review will be governed by the objectives that you established for the review.  At a minimum, you’ll draft criteria for responsive documents.  In addition, you may draft criteria for privileged documents, hot documents, and so on.  Let’s start with drafting responsive criteria.  For this step, you’ll need the request for production and the notes that you took when you sampled the document collection.

For each separate point on the request for production, do the following:

• Expand on the definition.  Make it clearer and more detailed.  Make sure that the language you use is understandable to lay people.
• List topic areas that are likely to appear in responsive documents.  Make sure these topic areas are objective in nature and that they minimize the need for judgment.  For example, don’t include criteria like “documents that demonstrate negligence in operations”.  Rather, break this down into real-life objective examples like “documents that discuss accidents”, “documents that discuss poor employee performance” and so on.  Use real examples from the documents – examples that you came across during your sampling of the collection.
• List date ranges of responsive materials.
• Based on your review of the documents, list as many examples as you can of document types that are responsive, and attach examples to the criteria. 
• Based on your review of the documents, include as many examples as you can of responsive text.

Several members of the litigation team should review the draft criteria.  Once all suggestions for modifications and additions are agreed upon, put the criteria in “final” form – “final” meaning the document that you will use at the start of the review project.  As you go move forward, update the criteria with more examples and clearer definitions as you learn more about the collection.

In the next issue, we’ll cover criteria for other review objectives you might have established (for example, you might be screening for privilege or significance).

Have you drafted criteria for a document review of a large collection?  How did you approach it and how well did it work?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

In theory, responsive documents are described in the other side’s request for production.  In practice, those requests are often open to interpretation.  Your goal in drafting responsive criteria is to distill those requests and create a clear set of objective rules that leave little room for interpretation – a set of rules that can be applied correctly and consistently to the document collection.  This step is important for a couple of reasons:

• It is difficult to get consistent results from a group of people doing the same task.  No two people will make exactly the same decision about every document – not even attorneys.  Even an individual attorney will not always make the same decision about duplicates of the same document.  Thorough, clear, detailed and objective criteria will minimize inconsistencies.
• If discovery disputes arise, it may be necessary to demonstrate a good-faith effort.  Thorough, detailed criteria will help.  Judges understand the human error factor.  They are less tolerant of work that was approached casually or sloppily.  Clear, detailed criteria will demonstrate a carefully thought-out approach.

Where do you start?  First, do a little preparation.  There are some basic materials and information that you’ll need:

• The complaint.
• The request for production
• Knowledge of the document collection (in the last blog in this series, we talked about sampling the collection).
• Knowledge of the strategy for defending or prosecuting the case.

Once you’ve read the complaint and the document request and you’ve sampled the collection, you’ll have a feel for the materials that reviewers are likely to see and how those documents relate to the facts and legal issues in the case.  If a strategy for defending or prosecuting the case has been developed, make sure you understand that strategy.  It is likely that an understanding of the allegations and the strategy will broaden your view of what is responsive and important.

After these preparation steps, you’ll be ready to develop a first draft of the criteria.  In the next issue, we’ll talk about how to structure and write effective criteria.

Have you drafted criteria for a document review of a large collection?  How did you approach it and how well did it work?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

Once you’ve defined the objectives of the review, you need to move forward with other preparation steps: You need to draft review criteria, you need to identify the type of people that are appropriate for the review (do you need a staff of attorneys?  lay people?  staff with expertise in a specific subject matter?), and you need to pull that team together.  

Before moving forward with these steps, you need a bit more information.  You need to know what’s in the document collection.  You need to know what types of documents are in the collection and you need to know what type of content is in the documents.  Once you’ve got a handle on the collection, you’ll be in a better position to make decisions on subsequent steps.

Start by interviewing custodians.  You don’t need to talk to every custodian, but talk to a representative sample.  For example, if you are collecting documents from a corporate client, speak to at least one person from each department from which you’ve collected documents.  The person you speak to should probably be a manager or someone who has a good handle on the overall operation of the department.  Find out about the department’s operations and determine its role in the events that are at issue in the case.  Ask about the types of documents that are generated and retained.  Information that you glean here will help in the next step:  sampling the collection.

After you’ve collected information from the custodians, take a look at the documents.  Review a representative sample.  Look at documents from each custodian.  Take notes on what you are finding and make copies of documents that can be used as examples to illustrate the criteria you’ll be drafting and to be used in training.

Your ultimate goal is to develop a set of objective rules that a well-trained staff can apply effectively and consistently to the collection during the review.  The more you learn about the documents in advance, the better you’ll be able to do that.  So spend the time up front learning what you can about what’s in your document collection.

Do you typically sample an eDiscovery document collection before a review?  How did you approach it?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

Yesterday, we introduced the blog series to discuss Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team.  Now, it’s time to get started!  The first step in preparing for a document review is to very clearly define the objectives of the review.  It’s an easy step, but it’s very important.  It will drive several subsequent decisions that you’ll make regarding management of the project. 

Here are some likely objectives you may choose:

• Identify responsive documents
• Identify privileged documents
• Identify documents to be reviewed by an expert
• Identify significant helpful and harmful documents

The choices you make here will affect the type of people you’ll assign to the review, the amount of time the review will take, the type of criteria you’ll need to draft, and the level of training you’ll need to do.

How do you make these decisions?  There are a few factors that should affect your choices:

• The nature of the case and the nature of the document collection:  What type of case are you handling and what types of documents are in the collection?  If the case involves highly technical or scientific subject matter, you may need to train the review staff to segregate those documents that require review by an expert.
• Where are you on the case and what do you know so far?  If you don’t know much yet about the case and what will be important, you won’t be in a position to ask reviewers to recognize significant materials.
• What’s the pool of available reviewers?  Can you easily pull together a team that’s qualified to identify potentially privileged or significant documents?   If you need a very large team, you might be better off working with a team that can more easily focus on objective criteria, and use a smaller group of attorney staff to work with a smaller collection after the initial review.

Determine the objectives that will work best for your case and that can be accomplished with the available resources.  Make sure that the objectives are clearly defined and that everyone on the litigation team understands the objectives and has the same expectations.

What do you look to accomplish with an eDiscovery document review?  Have you had objectives in addition to those listed above?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

In a perfect world, attorneys responsible for a case would review an entire document collection for responsive materials.  On large cases with huge collections, that’s just not practical or possible.  In those situations, your only choice may be to pull together a team of contract reviewers to identify responsive materials.  

How well does this work?  A review done by a contract review team will certainly cost less than one done by a team of law firm attorneys.  More likely than not, it will be done more efficiently.  And if there’s good preparation and management, the quality will be just as good (in fact, it may be better because a contract staff is more likely to stay better focused on the inevitable, more mundane aspects of the work).

I’ve managed many successful review projects done by teams of contract employees.  Sometimes those teams were made up of attorneys, but more often they included mostly paralegals and college-educated lay personnel with good reading and comprehension skills.  These projects were successful because they were structured and managed in a way where decision-making responsibility was in the hands of the attorneys, but there were effective mechanisms in place for disseminating those decisions to the team.  In this blog series, I’m going to walk through how to do this.  Specifically, we’ll be covering:

• Clearly defining the objectives of the document review
• Getting a handle on the document collection
• Determining the right mix of people for the project
• Creating effective document review criteria
• Effectively training the review team
• Managing the project
• Disseminating updated project information
• Implementing effective quality control procedures

What has been your experience with contract review teams for large projects?  Do you have good or bad experiences you can tell us about?  Are there any specific problems you’ve had with review teams?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.