Review

 

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.

 

Before assembling the review team, think through how the project will be structured.  This will drive decisions on the type of people that you’ll need.  Your goal is to get the work done as cost effectively as possible – using less expensive personnel where possible — without sacrificing work quality or the utility of the work product.

The “base” of the project will be comprised of contract reviewers and qc staff.  In the project plan, you determined the number of people that you need.  At this point, don’t worry about who will be a reviewer and who will do qc work.  Everybody can start as a reviewer.  After a few days, you can identify who will do qc work.  You’ve got options for assembling this staff, but you should consider working with a litigation support vendor who offers staffing services.  A good vendor already has access to a pool of people with document review experience.  This can save you lots of time and work.

In addition to the contract review staff, you’ll need project management staff.  We’ve already talked about a project manager.  For a large project, you’ll want project supervisors — each responsible for a team of reviewers/qc personnel.  Each supervisor is responsible for overseeing the flow of work to the team, the quality of the work done by the team, the productivity of team members, and answering questions raised by reviewers (or ensuring that questions are resolved).  I usually create teams of 10 to 12 and assign one supervisor to a team.   The supervisors might be law firm litigation support professionals, or supervisory staff provided by the vendor with whom you are working.

You’ll also need “decision makers” and experts in the subject matter to round out the team.  At a minimum, you’ll want an attorney from the litigation team.  Depending on the complexity of the documents, you might need a client employee who is familiar with the company’s operations and documents.  These people should be on-site, full-time for the first few days of a project.  Eventually there will be fewer questions and it’s probably sufficient to have phone access to these team members.

Later in this blog series we’ll talk about how these staff levels interact so that decisions are made by attorneys but effectively implemented by review staff.

How do you structure 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.

 

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.

Yesterday, we covered drafting criteria for responsiveness.  You may, however, be asking the review team to do more than identify responsive documents.  You might, for example, also ask them to identify privileged documents, significant documents, documents that need to be redacted, documents that need to be reviewed by an expert, and so on.  In this issue, we’ll talk about reviewing for privilege.

First, let’s clarify what you’ll be asking the review team to do.  If you are using a team of contract reviewers, it is unlikely that you’ll be asking them to make privilege decisions.  You might, however, ask them to identify and flag potentially privileged documents.  Under this approach, attorneys on your team who can make privilege decisions would do a subsequent review of the potentially privileged documents.  That’s when privilege decisions will be made.

Of course, you’ll need to give the contract team criteria for potentially privileged materials.  Consider including these information points and instructions in the criteria:

• The names and initials of individual attorneys, both outside counsel and corporate in-house attorneys.
• The names and initials of legal assistants and other litigation team members of outside counsel and the corporate legal department (work done by these individuals under the direction of counsel may be privileged).
• The names of law firms that have served as outside counsel.
• Documents on law firm letterhead.
• Documents stamped “Work Product”, “Attorney Client”, “Privileged” or other designations indicating confidentiality re litigation.
• Legal documents such as pleadings or briefs in draft form.
• Handwritten annotations on documents that may be authored by counsel or litigation team members under the direction of counsel.
• Subject areas of privileged communication.

In addition, provide instructions for documents that will not be privileged.  In every collection, there will be certain types of documents that won’t be privileged unless they bear privileged annotations.  Examples are published literature, press releases, advertisements, corporate annual reports, brochures, user manuals…  in short, any documents that are public in nature.  These materials won’t be privileged unless they bear privileged annotations.  Likewise, most document collections will include internal documents that will fall into the same category.  Examples may be insurance policies, invoices, manufacturing reports, and so on.  Create a list of these documents and include them in the criteria instructions.

Have you drafted criteria for a privilege review of a large collection?  How did you approach it and how well did it work?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.

 

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.  For this step, you’ll need the request for production and the notes that you took when you sampled the document collection.

For each separate point on the request for production, do the following:

• Expand on the definition.  Make it clearer and more detailed.  Make sure that the language you use is understandable to lay people.
• List topic areas that are likely to appear in responsive documents.  Make sure these topic areas are objective in nature and that they minimize the need for judgment.  For example, don’t include criteria like “documents that demonstrate negligence in operations”.  Rather, break this down into real-life objective examples like “documents that discuss accidents”, “documents that discuss poor employee performance” and so on.  Use real examples from the documents – examples that you came across during your sampling of the collection.
• List date ranges of responsive materials.
• Based on your review of the documents, list as many examples as you can of document types that are responsive, and attach examples to the criteria. 
• Based on your review of the documents, include as many examples as you can of responsive text.

Several members of the litigation team should review the draft criteria.  Once all suggestions for modifications and additions are agreed upon, put the criteria in “final” form – “final” meaning the document that you will use at the start of the review project.  As you go move forward, update the criteria with more examples and clearer definitions as you learn more about the collection.

In the next issue, we’ll cover criteria for other review objectives you might have established (for example, you might be screening for privilege or significance).

Have you drafted criteria for a document review of a large collection?  How did you approach it and how well did it work?  Please share any comments you might have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.