Document review projects can be overwhelming–from drafting review protocols, to developing workflows, to meeting deadlines. Fortunately, there are easy ways to make this process more manageable. Below are a few best practices to better facilitate your next document review project.
Know Your Data
Before reviewing a document, you can gather valuable insights by understanding how it was included in your review set. Consider asking the following questions: What data was collected, and from whom? How was it deduplicated? What impact do the search terms and date ranges have on your review? Understanding the “why” of your data will provide important context for your document set, improve comprehension, and streamline the review process.
Understand your Review Goals
Consider your purpose and the impact it will have on the review. The review approach will vary depending on if you are reviewing for early case assessment, production to opposing party, or preparing for depositions. Once you know what you are looking to accomplish, you should consider leveraging technology to help meet your goals in a more efficient manner.
Document Review
The document review process has a few key aspects that review managers and reviewers should be aware of including protocols, quality control, and communication.
Protocols
Develop a written protocol that clearly identifies the facts of the case, the issues for review, scope of responsiveness, and any potential privilege you expect to encounter. Make sure your teams know if they are taking a broad or narrow approach to certain issues to ensure consistency across the review.
Quality Control
Start quality control checks early to identify any misunderstandings and seek clarification on complicated issues as soon as possible. The QC process should be ongoing throughout the life of the case. Be sure to communicate common issues with the review team. It’s important to have standing calls where you can walk through example documents and ask questions. After the call, put the questions and answers in writing for reviewers to reference. You should offer individual feedback to address any specific issues that arise during the review process.
Communication
Effective communication is crucial both for addressing specific issues during document review and for understanding the broader context of the case. It is therefore important to keep everyone from the case team, project management, and document review up to date on the review status, potential new data, and production deadlines. The whole team should understand what is expected of them so they can successfully meet deadlines and ensure a smooth review process.
Integrating Legal Technology Solutions Effectively
Leverage technology where possible. Many tools exist that can be used to give a better understanding of what is in the data, to help cull the data, and to expedite review or QC processes. Analytics offerings like Relationship Analyzer or Clustering can provide insights into how often people are communicating or how often certain topics are discussed. Near Duplicates can give reviewers the ability to see similar documents at the same time based on their textual similarity. Email Thread Analyzer can group email threads together and reduce the threads down to just the inclusive or unique portions of those email chains.
Technology Assisted Review can be used to prioritize the review of relevant documents for efficiency, to help identify potential issues early in a case, and for cost saving measures. TAR 2.0 utilizes continuous active learning (CAL) to prioritize review of documents it believes has the highest likelihood of responsiveness. This system can be used to move through large volumes of documents and locate key documents for privilege QC models.
Generative AI can create responses based on closed data sets and well-crafted prompts. This technology can provide document summaries, extract key people and dates from data sets, analyze sentiment, answer questions, and provide privilege log summaries.
Conclusion
The best way to streamline the document review process is to understand what you have and why you have it. Make sure your team understands what they are looking for and that they are utilizing technology that can make the process more efficient.
Want to learn more about how we can assist with your document review project? Contact us at solutions@sandlineglobal.com or reach out via the contact us form found here.
