Best Practices For Hassle-Free Document Review

By Michael Swarz, eClaris, Inc.

The vast majority of botched document review errors are comprehendible. Most document reviewers lose focus when dealing with mountains of emails, spreadsheets and memorandums on less than exciting subjects. These lapses make it challenging for document reviewers to make a call on privilege, responsiveness and relevance. To boost document review output quality here are 5 recommended best practices to help minimize, and hopefully eradicate, sloppy document review.

You have a run of the mill court case requires a through review of 200,000 documents during the discovery phase that may or may not contain information that is relevant and responsive. As such, you assemble a legal team to mine through all the paperwork. When the team completes this arduous task they report back to you that they were successful in reviewing the data and that all responsive documents have been accounted for. The team leader is even as so bold to relate that their review was 99.96% accurate based on a test the team conducted for posterities sake. However, as they uncork a bottle of champagne to celebrate, you sadly discover that, as it turns out, that 61 documents were not tagged properly and, to make matters worse, 4 damaging highly confidential emails were accidentally produced to the other side. As it turns out, 99.96% was not good enough.

Upon further review, when thorough evaluation of a document review occurs one learns something quite unexpected and shocking. Even the best document review teams can and will make wrong review decisions at time. As a result, documents may be improperly issue coded or falsely labeled as responsive and privileged. How have law firms avoided these dreaded pitfalls? By using better technologies, wiser review protocols and implementing effective management controls.