eDiscovery Daily Blog
Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Prepare a Review Plan
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.