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Project Management

eDiscovery Best Practices: 4 Steps to Effective eDiscovery With Software Analytics
 

I read an interesting article from Texas Lawyer via Law.com entitled “4 Steps to Effective E-Discovery With Software Analytics” that has some interesting takes on project management principles related to eDiscovery and I’ve interjected some of my thoughts into the analysis below.  A copy of the full article is located here.  The steps are as follows:

1. With the vendor, negotiate clear terms that serve the project's key objectives.  The article notes the important of tying each collection and review milestone (e.g., collecting and imaging data; filtering data by file type; removing duplicates; processing data for review in a specific review platform; processing data to allow for optical character recognition (OCR) searching; and converting data into a tag image file format (TIFF) for final production to opposing counsel) to contract terms with the vendor. 

The specific milestones will vary – for example, conversion to TIFF may not be necessary if the parties agree to a native production – so it’s important to know the size and complexity of the project, and choose only an experienced eDiscovery vendor who can handle the variations.

2. Collect and process data.  Forensically sound data collection and culling of obviously unresponsive files (such as system files) to drastically decrease the overall review costs are key services that a vendor provides in this area.  As we’ve noted many times on this blog, effective culling can save considerable review costs – each gigabyte (GB) culled can save $16-$18K in attorney review costs.

The article notes that a hidden cost is the OCR process of translating extracted text into a searchable form and that it’s an optimal negotiation point with the vendor.  This may have been true when most collections were paper based, but as most collections today are electronic based, the percentage of documents requiring OCR is considerably less than it used to be.  However, it is important to be prepared that there are some native files which will be “image only”, such as TIFFs and scanned PDFs – those will require OCR to be effectively searched.

3. Select a data and document review platform.  Factors such as ease of use, robustness, and reliability of analytic tools, support staff accessibility to fix software bugs quickly, monthly user and hosting fees, and software training and support fees should be considered when selecting a document review platform.

The article notes that a hidden cost is selecting a platform with which the firm’s litigation support staff has no experience as follow-up consultation with the vendor could be costly.  This can be true, though a good vendor training program and an intuitive interface can minimize or even eliminate this component.

The article also notes that to take advantage of the vendor’s more modern technology “[a] viable option is to use a vendor's review platform that fits the needs of the current data set and then transfer the data to the in-house system”.  I’m not sure why the need exists to transfer the data back – there are a number of vendors that provide a cost-effective solution appropriate for the duration of the case.

4. Designate clear areas of responsibility.  By doing so, you minimize or eliminate inefficiencies in the project and the article mentions the RACI matrix to determine who is responsible (individuals responsible for performing each task, such as review or litigation support), accountable (the attorney in charge of discovery), consulted (the lead attorney on the case), and informed (the client).

Managing these areas of responsibility effectively is probably the biggest key to project success and the article does a nice job of providing a handy reference model (the RACI matrix) for defining responsibility within the project.

So, what do you think?  Do you have any specific thoughts about this article?   Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Trends: Thought Leader Interview with Jeffrey Brandt, Editor of Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest
 

As eDiscovery Daily has done in the past, we have periodically interviewed various thought leaders in eDiscovery and legal technology to provide insight as to trends in the industry for our readers to consider.  Recently, I was able to interview Jeffrey Brandt, Editor of the Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest and columnist for Legal IT Professionals.

With an educational background in computer science and mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh, Jeff has over twenty four years of experience in the field of legal automation working with various organizations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.  As a technology and management consultant to hundreds of law firms and corporate law departments he has worked on information management projects including: long range strategic planning, workflow management and reengineering, knowledge management, IT structure and personnel requirements and budgeting. Working as a CIO at several large law firms, Jeff has helped bring oversight, coordination and change management to initiatives including: knowledge management, library & research services, eDiscovery, records management, technology and more. Most recently, he served as the Chief Information and Knowledge Officer with an AMLaw 100 law firm based out of Washington, DC.

Jeff has also been asked to serve on numerous advisory councils and CIO advisory boards for key vendors in the legal space, advising them on issues of client service and future product direction.  He is a long time member (and former board member) of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) and has taught CLE classes on topics ranging from litigation support to ethics and technology.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery in 2011 and beyond on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

I would say that the biggest two are the project management component and, for lack of a better term, automated or artificial intelligence.

The whole concept and the complexities of what it takes to manage a case today are more challenging than ever, including issues like the number of sources, the amount of data in the sources, the format in which you’re producing, where can the data go and who can see it.  I remember the days when people used to take a couple of bankers boxes, put them in their car and go home and work on the documents.  You simply cannot do that today – the amount of information today is just insane.

As for artificial intelligence, as was discussed in the (Pinhawk) digest recently, you’re seeing the emergence of predictive coding and using computers to cull through the massive amounts of information so that a human can take the final pass.  I think more and more we’re going to see people relying on those types of technologies – some because they embrace it, others because there is no other way to humanly do it.

I think if there’s any third trend it would probably be where do we go next to get the data?  In terms of social media, mining Facebook and Twitter and all the other various sources for additional data as part of the discovery process has become a challenge.

You recently became editor of the Pinhawk Law Technology Daily Digest.  Tell me about that and about your plans for the digest.

Well, I think there are several things going forward.  My role is to keep up the good work that Curt Meltzer, the founding editor, started and fill the “big shoes” that Curt left behind.  My goal is to expand the sources of information from which Pinhawk draws.  There are about 400 sources today and I think by the time my sources (and possibly a few others) are added in, there will be over 500.  We’ve also talked about going to our readership and asking them “what are your go-to and must read sources?” to include those sources as well.  We’ll also be looking to incorporate social media tools to hopefully make the experience much more comprehensive and easier to participate in for the Pinhawk digest reader.

And, what should we be looking for in your column in Legal IT Professionals?

Well, I like to dabble in multiple areas – in the small consulting practice that I have, I do a little bit of everything.  I’ve recently done some very interesting work in communities of practice, using social media tools, focusing them inward in law firms to provide the forum for lawyers to open up, share and mentor to others.  I like KM (Knowledge Management) and related topics and we had a recent post in Pinhawk talking about the future of the law firm.  To me, those types of discussions are fascinating.

You take the extremes and you’ve got the “law factory”, you take the high-end and you’ve got the “bet the farm” law firm.  How technology plays a role in whatever culture, whatever focus a law firm puts itself on is interesting.  And then you watch and see some of the rumblings and inklings of what can be done in places like Australia, where you have third-party investment of law firms and the United Kingdom, where they are about to get third-party investment.  There was a recent article about third-party ownership of law firms in North Carolina.  You look at examples like that and you say “is the model of partnership alive?”  When you get into “big law”, are they really partnerships?  Where are they in the spectrum of a thousand sole practitioners operating under one letterhead to a firm of a thousand lawyers?  That’s where I think that communities of practice and social media tools are going to help lawyers know more about their own partners and own firms. 

It’s sad that in some firms the lawyers on the north side of the building don’t even know the lawyers on the south side of the building, let alone the people on the eighth floor vs. the tenth floor.  It’s a changing landscape.  When I got into legal and was first a CIO at Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur, 250 lawyers in Columbus, Ohio was the 83rd largest law firm in the US – an AMLAW 100 firm.  Today, does that size a firm even make it into the AMLAW 250?

In my column at Legal IT Professionals, you’ll see more about KM and change management.  Another part of my practice is mentoring IT executives in how to deal with business problems related to the business of law and I think that might be my next post – free advice to the aspiring CIO.

This might sound odd coming from a technologist, but…it’s not really about the technology.  From a broad standpoint, you can be successful with most software tools.  A law firm isn’t going to be made or broken whether it chose OpenText or iManage as a document management tool or chose a specific litigation support tool.  It is more about the people, the education and the process than it is the actual tool.  Yes, there are some horrible tools that you should avoid, but, all things being equal, it’s really more the other pieces of the equation that determine your success.

Thanks, Jeff, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

eDiscovery Trends: 2011 eDiscovery Errors Survey
 

As noted in Legal IT Professionals on Friday, LDM Global on Friday announced the results of its 2011 eDiscovery Errors survey. The company asked a selection of industry professionals their views on which errors they experienced most often during the discovery process. Results were collected from across the USA, Europe and Australia.

According to Scott Merrick, LDM Global Marketing Director and survey author, “Our goal was to find out what the real, day to day issues and problems are around the discovery process.”  He also noted that “Of particular interest was the ongoing challenge of good communication. Technology has not solved that challenge and it remains at the forefront of where mistakes are made.”

The respondents of the survey were broken down into the following groups: Litigation Support Professionals 47%, Lawyers 30%, Paralegals 11%, IT Professionals 9% and Others 3%.  Geographically, the United States and Europe had 46% of the respondents each, with the remaining 8% of respondents coming from Australia.  LDM Global did not identify the total number of respondents to the survey.

For each question about errors, respondents were asked to classify the error as “frequently occurs”, “occasionally occurs”, “not very common” or “never occurs”.  Based on responses, the most common errors are:

  • Failure to Effectively Communicate across Teams: 50% of the respondents identified this error as one that frequently occurs
  • An Inadequate Data Retention Policy: 47% of the respondents identified this error as one that frequently occurs
  • Not Collecting all Pertinent Data: 41% of the respondents identified this error as one that frequently occurs
  • Failure to Perform Critical Quality Control (i.e., sampling): 40% of the respondents identified this error as one that frequently occurs
  • Badly Thought Out, or Badly Implemented, Policy: 40% of the respondents identified this error as one that frequently occurs

Perhaps one of the most surprising results is that only 14% of respondents identified Spoliation of evidence, or the inability to preserve relevant emails as an error that frequently occurs.  So, why are there so many cases in which sanctions have been issued for that very issue?  Interesting…

For complete survey results, go to LDMGlobal.com.

So, what do you think?  What are the most common eDiscovery errors that your organization has encountered?   Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Use the Team’s Knowledge

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:

  • Ask for summary memos:  Ask supervisors on the project to prepare a summary memo for each custodian.  To get good summary information you should provide specific instructions for the information you would like included.  You could, for example, ask for this information about each custodian:
    • A description of the types of documents in the collection (for example, letter, monthly reports, work sheets, and so on).
    • A description of the general topics that are covered.
    • An approximate date range of the documents in the custodian’s files.
    • A list of key individuals (and organizations) with whom the custodian frequently corresponds.
  • Interview the review team:  Meet periodically with the group.  Spend an hour at the end of a workday and interview them about what they are seeing in the collection.  If there are certain topics you are hoping to see covered in the documents, ask the team about them.  Likewise, if there are certain topics that you hope not to see, ask about those as well.  This type of exchange will serve three purposes:
    • It will give senior litigation team members useful information about the document collection.
    • It will be useful for review team members to learn about what other team members are seeing.
    • It’s great for team morale.  It really reinforces that their work is important and that their input is valuable.

What steps do you take to make use of what the review team learns in the document review?  Do you have suggestions you can share with us?

This concludes our blog series on Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team.  I hope you found it useful!

Please share any comments you have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Keep the Staff Motivated
 

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:

  • Give them the big picture:  Let the review staff know how their work fits into the overall litigation process, how their work product will be used, and how important their contribution is to the case.
  • Keep them up-to-date on the status of the case:  Let them know what’s going on.  Tell them when case milestones have been met, when initial production deadlines have been met, and what the attorneys are doing.  
  • Have senior attorneys give them some attention:  Ask senior attorneys on the case to stop by periodically and speak to the group.  This, more than anything, will reinforce how important their work is to the case.
  • Give frequent feedback to each member of the team:  Each supervisor should be responsible for giving regular feedback to members of the team.  This should be a daily task, done with team members on a rotating basis.  Every team member – even those doing excellent work – should get one-on-one time with the supervisor. 
  • Make sure the work environment is comfortable and pleasant:  Things like good lighting, comfortable chairs, good ventilation and a comfortable temperature can have a huge effect on both morale and productivity.

What do you do to keep a contract review staff motivated?  Do you have suggestions you can share with us?  Please share any comments you have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Ensuring High-Quality, Consistent Work

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.

  • Continuously sample the documents that are coming through the pipeline:  Regardless of how much time you spent looking at the documents before the project started, there will be surprises in the collection.  And often, similar documents appear together in a collection.  Your project will run much smoother if you know what’s coming before the documents are in the hands of the reviewer.  Have supervisors spend time each day looking at what’s coming next.  When you see documents that will be new to the group, alert the staff.  Have a short meeting with the group.  Show them what they’ll be seeing and tell them how to categorize the documents.
  • Disseminate updated rules and new examples:  As you move through the review, you’ll be continuously seeing new types of documents and refining the criteria to cover what you are seeing.  Make sure this information gets disseminated to the staff.  Update the criteria frequently (in the beginning, this may be daily) and distribute the revised rules and examples to the staff.  Have meetings with the staff to go over new rules.  While meetings will disrupt the work, it will save you time in the long run – time in having to do re-work and fix errors.
  • Quality Control:  As soon as you can, identify members of the review team to do quality control work and make it their job to review the work of the review staff.  At first, they’ll probably need to look at everything.  As the project progresses, they should be able to sample the work.
  • Attorney sampling:  Attorneys should sample work product throughout the life of the project.  They should spot-check the documents in each category (responsive, not responsive, and privileged).

What steps do you take to ensure that a review team is doing high-quality work?  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.

eDiscovery Trends: Jack Halprin of Autonomy
 

This is the fifth of the LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and asked each of them the same three questions:

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Jack Halprin.  As Vice President, eDiscovery and Compliance with Autonomy, Jack serves as internal and external legal subject matter expert for best practices and defensible processes around litigation, electronic discovery, legal hold, and compliance issues. He speaks frequently on enterprise legal risk management, compliance, and eDiscovery at industry events and seminars, and has authored numerous articles on eDiscovery, legal hold, social media, and knowledge management. He is actively involved in The Sedona Conference, ACC, and Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). With a BA in Chemistry from Yale University, a JD from the University of California-Los Angeles, and certifications from the California, Connecticut, Virginia and Patent Bars, Mr. Halprin has varied expertise that lends itself well to both the legal and technical aspects of electronic discovery collection and preservation.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

If I look at the overall trends, social media and the cloud are probably the two hottest topics from a technology perspective and also a data management perspective.  From the legal perspective, you’re looking at preservation issues and sanctions as well as the idea of proportionality.  You also see a greater need for technology that can meet the needs of attorneys and understand the meaning of information.  More and more, everyone is realizing that keyword searches are lacking – they aren’t really as effective as everyone thinks they are.

We’re also starting to see two other technology related trends.  The industry is consolidating and customers are really starting to look for a single platform.  The current process of importing/exporting of data from storage to legal hold collection, to early case assessment, to review, to production and creating several extra copies of the documents in the process is not manageable going forward.  Customers want to be able to preserve in place, to analyze in place, and they don’t want to have to collect and duplicate the data again and again.  If you look at the left side of EDRM, the more proactive side, they don’t want put data or documents in a special repository unless it’s a true record that no one needs to access on a regular basis.  They want to work with active data where it lives.

You’ll see a reduction in the number of vendors in the next year or two, and the technology will not only be able to handle the current data sources, but the increased data volumes and new types of data we’re seeing.  Everyone is looking at social media and saying “how are we going to handle this”, when it’s really just another data source that has to be addressed.  Yes, it’s challenging because there is so much of it and it is even more conversational than email, taking it to a whole new level, but it’s really no different from other data sources.  A keyword search on a social media site is not going to net you the results you’re looking for, but conceptual search to understand the context of what people mean will help you identify the relevant information.  Growth rates are predicted at more than 60 percent for unstructured information, but social media is growing at a much faster clip.  A lot of people are looking at social media and moving to the cloud to manage this data, reducing some of the infrastructure costs, taking strain off the network and reducing their IT footprint.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the first afternoon of LTNY}  I’ll take it first from the Autonomy perspective.  We have social media solutions, which we’ve had for our marketing business (Interwoven) for some time.  We’ve also had social media governance technology for quite some time as well, and we announced today new capabilities for identifying, preserving and collecting social media for eDiscovery, which is part of and builds on our end-to-end solution.  I haven’t spent much time on the floor yet, but based on everything I’ve seen in the eDiscovery space, a lot of people are talking about social media, but no one really understands how to address it.  You’ve got people scraping {social media} pages, but if you scrape the page without the active link or without capturing the context behind it, you’re missing the wealth of the information.  We’re taking a different approach, we take the entire page, including the context and active links.

There’s also a wide disparity in terms of the cloud.  Is it public?  Is it private?  How much control do you have over your data when it’s in the cloud?  You’ve got a lot of vendors out there that aren’t transparent about their data centers.  You’ve got vendors that say they’re SAS 70 Type II certified, but it’s their data center, not the vendor itself, that is certified.  So, who’s got the experience?  Every year at LegalTech, there are probably forty new vendors out there and the next year, half or more of them are gone.

As for the tone of the show, I think it’s certainly more upbeat than last year when attendance was down, and it’s a bit more “bouncy” this year.  With that in mind, you’ll continue to see acquisitions and you’ll have the issue companies merged through acquisition using different technologies and different search engines, meaning they’re not on a single platform and not really a single solution.  So, that gets back to the idea that customers are really looking for a single platform with a single engine underneath it.  That’s how we approach it, and I think others are trying to get to that point, but I don’t think there are many vendors there yet.  That’s where the trend is heading.

What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

In addition to the new social media eDiscovery capabilities described above, we’ve announced the Autonomy Chaining Console, which is a dashboard to provide corporate legal departments with greater visibility and defensibility across the entire process and to eliminate those risky data import/export handoffs through each step.  Many of the larger corporations have hundreds of cases, dozens of outside law firms, and terabytes of data to manage.  The process today is very “silo” oriented – data is sent to processing vendors, it is sent to law firms, etc.  So, you get these “weak links in the chain” where data can get lost and risks of spoliation and costs increase.  Autonomy announced the whole idea of chaining last year promoting the idea that we can seamlessly connect law firms and their corporate clients in a secure manner, so that the law firm can login to a secure portal and can manage the data that they’re allowed to access.  The Chaining Console strengthens that capability, and it adds Autonomy IDOL’s ability to understand meaning and allows corporate and outside counsel to look at the same data on the same solution.  It uses IDOL to determine potential custodians, understand fact patterns and identify other companies that may be involved by really analyzing the data and providing an understanding of what’s there.  It can also monitor and track risk, so you can set up certain policies around key issues; for example, insider trading, securities fraud, FCPA, etc.  Using those policies, it can alert you to the risks that are there and possibly identify the custodians that are engaging in risky behavior.  And, of course, it tracks the data from start to finish, giving corporate counsel, legal IT, IT, litigation support, litigation counsel as well as outside counsel a single view of the data on a single dashboard.  It strengthens our message and takes us to the next step in really providing the end-to-end platform for our clients.

We’ve also announced iManage in the cloud for legal information management in the cloud.  The cloud-based Information Management platform combines WorkSite, Records Manager, Universal Search, Process Automation and ConflictsManager to help attorneys manage the content throughout the matter lifecycle from inception to disposition.  It uses IDOL’s ability to group concepts, so if you have a conflict with Apple, it knows that you’re searching for terms related to Apple computer such as Mac, iPhone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Jonathon Ives and understands that these are related terms and individuals.  And, we’ve just announced the cloud-based version of that.  We’re already managing information governance in the cloud for a lot of our clients and the platform leverages our private cloud, which is the world’s largest private cloud with over 17 petabytes of data.

And, then we have a market leadership announcement with additional major law firms that are using our solutions, such as Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP, Brown Rudnick LLP, Fennemore Craig, etc.  So, we have four press releases with new developments at Autonomy that we’ve announced here at the show.

Thanks, Jack, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Keeping Decisions in the Hands of the Attorneys
 

The main objective in most document reviews is to categorize each document into one of three categories:

  • Responsive, to be produced
  • Not Responsive
  • 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:

  • You sampled the collection, looked at a lot of documents, and made decisions regarding how to categorize them
  • You drafted detailed, objective criteria that encapsulates that work product
  • You thoroughly trained the contract staff

And, you’ve staffed the project in a hierarchy that works well for keeping decisions in the hands of the attorneys.  Let’s review how this works in practice.

The base of your project is made up of contract reviewers who have been trained and armed with solid, objective criteria.  They won’t make decisions regarding what constitutes responsiveness or privilege.  They are simply applying rules that have already been developed by attorneys responsible for the case.  When a reviewer comes across a document that isn’t covered by the rules, they bring it to a supervisor.  The supervisor won’t make substantive decisions either, but the supervisor has had more access to the attorneys and broader exposure to the document collection than an individual reviewer, so the supervisor will in many cases know how to categorize a document in question.  When the supervisor can’t do that, it gets kicked up to the next level (most likely the project manager) who has yet broader exposure to the collection.  Some documents will get funneled up to an attorney for a decision.  In fact, that’s likely to happen frequently at the start of the project.  That’s why it’s important that attorney decision-makers are on-site and available full-time in the beginning.  As the project moves forward, you may be able to get by with attorneys being available remotely.

There are other steps you’ll take and mechanisms that you’ll employ to ensure that this model works well.  We’ll cover those in the next post in this series.

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

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Starting the Project
 

Throughout the life of the project, you will implement some standard project management techniques for monitoring quality and ensuring that questions are resolved efficiently.  We’re going to cover those techniques in the next blog posts in this series.  There are, however, a couple of special steps you should take at the beginning of a project to ensure that it gets off to a smooth start.

First, you want to make sure very quickly that everyone on the team understands the criteria and is applying it correctly to the documents.  The best way to do this is to check everybody’s initial work right away and to provide feedback as quickly as you can.   Make arrangements with the supervisory staff to work extra hours the first few days of the project.  During the first couple of days of the project, have supervisors check the work after the review staff leaves.   Have the supervisors give feedback – one-on-one – to each team member within the first couple of days of the project.  In addition, make sure that the supervisors are communicating with one another and with the project manager about what they are finding.  Wide-spread misunderstandings will uncover holes in the training and can easily be cleared up with the group in short re-training sessions. 

When we talked about who should be on the review team, we talked about “decision makers” and subject matter experts.  Make sure these team members are onsite full-time the first few days of the project.  There will be a lot of questions the first few days, and you’ll want to resolve those questions quickly.  Once the project gets underway, the level of questions will subside, and the supervisors and project manager will be better equipped to answer the questions that do arise.  At that point, you probably don’t need the decision makers and subject matter experts on hand full time.  But make sure they are present at the start of the project. 

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

Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Training a Review Team
 

Yesterday, we discussed the assembling the project team for document review.  It’s also important that the review team gets good training.  As a starting point, prepare a training manual for each team member that includes this information:

  • The document review criteria
  • A list of the custodians.  For each, provide the custodian’s title, a job description, a description of his/her role in the events that are at issue in the case, and a description of the types of documents you expect will be found in his/her files
  • Lists of keywords, key characters, key events, and key dates
  • Samples of responsive documents that you collected when you reviewed the collection
  • The review procedures
  • The review schedule
  • Instructions for use of the review tool

Cover these topics in training:

  • Case background information
    • A description of the parties
    • A description of the events that led to the case
    • A description of the allegations and defenses
    • An overview of the expected case schedule
  • Project overview information
    • A description of the goals of the review project
    • A description of the process
    • An overview of the expected project schedule
  • Responsive criteria
    • Go through the criteria – point-by-point – to ensure that the group understands what is responsive
    • Provide samples of responsive documents
  • Mechanics
    • Describe the roles of individuals on the team
    • Review the procedures for reviewing documents
    • Train the reviewers in use of the online review tool

Give the team training exercises – that is, give them sample documents to review.  Collect the work, review it, and give feedback to the group.

And let me give you two more suggestions that will help make your training effective:

  1. Train the team together, rather than one-on-one or in sub-groups.  Under this team-training approach, you ensure that everyone hears the same thing, and that responses to questions asked by individuals will benefit the entire group.
  2. Involve a senior attorney in the training.  You might, for example, ask a senior attorney to give the case background information.  Attention from a senior litigation team member is good for morale.  It tells the team that the work they are doing is important to the case.

How do you approach training 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.