eDiscovery Daily Blog

• November 4, 2010

Last week, on Wednesday and Thursday, we talked about assembling an electronic discovery team.  That’s not the only team you might need.  You may need to assemble a team for a specific task — for example, for a document review.

It’s essential that you assign the right type of people to a task.  For many litigation projects, this means deciding whether attorneys or non-attorneys will do the work.

Pushing the work up to over-qualified people can be just as problematic as using under-qualified people.   I’ve seen first hand how important this is.  I once worked on two large cases simultaneously where millions of documents had to be reviewed in each case.  In one case, I convinced the client that paralegals could handle the bulk of the work.  In the other case, the client insisted that only lawyers could do the work.

I don’t have to tell you how much more the second client paid for the work.  You may be surprised, however, by the quality comparison.  Each project involved multiple law firms, and one firm was involved in both.  That firm did quality control on both projects, and found that there was significantly less re-work required in the project where paralegals did most of the work.

Why?  We gave the paralegals objective criteria that didn’t require a law degree to understand, and they were far more attentive to work that made the lawyer’s eyes glaze over.  The lawyers — who were responsible for making decisions, answering questions, and reviewing work — were able to stay attentive to the more substantive work.

This is where breaking a task into components can help.  Here’s an example.  Everyone knows that determining privilege is an attorney task.  That doesn’t mean, however, that only attorneys can work on the project.  In every collection there are types of documents that will never be privileged unless they bear privileged annotations (published materials, annual reports, case-specific documents like routine manufacturing and quality control reports, etc.).  A trained paralegal using good criteria can do an initial review to identify potentially privileged documents for attorney review.

A project handled like this will certainly cost less, and will probably result in more consistent, higher quality work.

Have you worked on projects where the wrong people did the work?  Please share your comments or let us know if you’d like more information on a topic.