Review

In this series, we turn our attention to the most time-consuming and expensive phase of an electronic discovery effort: document review. To help you to meet its challenges, we’re going to break review down into five subparts and discuss each in turn: what gets reviewed, for what it gets reviewed, by whom it gets reviewed, workflow design considerations, and quality control. We begin, in this Part, with what gets reviewed.

In this Part, we turn our attention to second of our five aspects of review: for what your review set gets reviewed, including: relevance and responsiveness, privilege, confidentiality, and deposition preparation.

Now that you have made decisions about what you are going to review and for what you are going to review it, you need to make decisions about who is going to perform that review. Broadly speaking, your choices are internal resources (i.e., the case team, existing corporate or firm staff) and external resources (i.e., contract reviewers, managed review services).

Designing an effective document review workflow is a project-specific exercise that requires consideration of a wide range of options and factors, including the features available in your chosen document review platform, the volumes and types of materials being reviewed, the number and nuance of things for which you are reviewing, the number and skill level of the chosen reviewers, and the available time for completion of the review.

In the last Part, we reviewed important considerations for making decisions about document flow and tagging palettes for your document review effort. In this Part, we conclude our workflow design considerations discussion with a look at batch creation and at tracking, reporting, and documentation.

The final and most important fundamental of review to understand is quality control. No matter what you’re reviewing, what you’re reviewing it for, who’s reviewing it, or how you’re reviewing it, you will need to take proactive steps to ensure the overall quality and consistency of that work. Perfection isn’t possible (and isn’t required), but reasonable efforts to meet your obligations of completeness, accuracy, and privilege protection are both.