Our Insights on eDiscovery

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.