Our Insights on eDiscovery

The document review effort is the litigation team’s first in-depth exposure to the client’s electronic documents. The review staff will have more exposure to a broader range of documents than anyone else on the team, at least in the beginning of the case. When you are using contract reviewers, they will go away when the review is completed. You don’t want to lose what they’ve learned when the project is over, so you should take some steps to use their knowledge. Here are two things you can do.

In the last blog post, we talked about steps you can take to ensure high-quality, consistent work from a contract review staff. There is one more, very important thing you should do: keep the staff motivated. There is no question that a motivated, content staff will produce better work than a staff that is indifferent. Here are a few things you can do.

The most common problem with work product done by a group is inconsistent work – which means that some of the work has been done wrong. This is a problem, however, that can be avoided. Of course there will always be some inconsistencies, but there are steps that you can take and procedures that you can follow that will minimize inconsistencies and result in high-quality work. Let’s go over those.

The main objective in most document reviews is to categorize each document into one of three categories: Responsive, Not Responsive and Privileged. Attorneys on the litigation team will make the decisions regarding how to categorize the documents, and the contract review staff will implement those decisions. Before the review even starts, you’ve done a lot of work to ensure that this process will work well.