Document Review, Technology

E-Discovery Project Management And Best Platforms, Part 2

Document review is mind-numbing, but there are tech platforms out there that can help you ease through your project.

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Last week, I discussed some of the benefits of using more advanced tools in document review and how it can affect your case outcome. In this column, I want to pick up where I left off and also give some helpful tips in managing large document review projects.

Set Up Your Tags to Prevent Carpal Tunnel of Your Brain

Document review is mind-numbing. A needlessly complicated or over-expansive document review protocol can lead to sloppy results when document reviewers get fatigued spending an hour coding 20 documents. Having a tight protocol does not cure the boredom of document review, but it helps.

When you receive data, some of the documents might be produced in native format, in which case, you will already have some embedded data (metadata) about each file, or it will be produced as a scanned document and you will need to add the necessary information to each document to properly classify and organize it. This is done through a tagging system — a list of check-box categories or issues for each document. Usually, you can apply multiple tags to a document. For example, you could have a document tagged as “hot,” “e-mail,” and “knowledge of danger.” Later when you run your searches to find the documents you need, you can filter out documents marked “duplicate” or have your search include only “hot” “e-mail” documents.

Most of the documents you get will be things that no one will ever look at again. If you’ve got 100,000 documents and 5% of them are hot, your case has 5,000 potential exhibits. That is a huge number of documents. In an 8-week trial, that would be about 150 exhibits being entered a day. More realistically, you’d want to keep about 2% or less of your data set as truly hot (depending on the case). So, what about the other 98% of the documents?

It is a common practice to set up a detailed tagging system to organize your database, but sometimes, less is more. Having document reviewers look at each document and classify all of the ways that it is not important can be a waste of time and resources. For example, assuming again you have 100,000 documents and 2,000 of them are relevant, if you have a tag for degree of relevancy, document type, document date, author, issue codes, and notes, you are going to be spending about one extra minute per document to classify 98,000 documents that no one will ever need.

Don’t Include Tags That Apply to Most of Your Data Set

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Remember, the goal of tagging your documents is to categorize them so that later, you can run searches to either include or exclude certain tags. With that in mind, you should not create tags that would apply to almost every document. For example, if you have a tag for documents that are relevant, but not really important, that’s probably going to be most of your documents. Consider how that tag would help your filtered searches later. It would be like running a search on Westlaw or Lexis for cases with the phrase “pierc! /2 corporate veil” that also includes “affirmed OR reversed.” If the goal is to create tight, filtered search results, adding that second query wouldn’t really help you because almost every case has that language. Not only does it not help you find the right document you need, but it is also a colossal waste of time if you have to have someone go through each document and manually add that tag to almost every document.

Factor in Text Search Capability When Making Your Tagging Structure

Likewise, you wouldn’t want a tag that is based entirely on whether a certain word is in a document. This happens a lot with adding tags for key players or, even worse, a text field for typing in the authors/recipients of documents. You are going to get a lot of “unknowns” until you get to the one e-mail sent to 50 people and then forwarded to 10 more people. You’ll spend 20 minutes coding that document before you can move on.

Keep in mind that most document review platforms will let you do text searches of your data and create saved searches. So, instead of having a tag for “John Schmidt,” consider running a text search for “John Schmidt OR jschmidt@bigcorp.com.” You can keep the “John Schmidt” tag, but only use it where text searches would not work, such as hand written notes or e-mails that say, “I’ll send this to head of marketing, JS.” That way, you can run the search above and include the criteria of also all of the documents tagged as “John Schmidt.”

The Benefits of iConect Xera

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Xera has all of the features that you would expect in a robust document review tool — searches and tag filters, the ability to customize your workspace, e-mail analytics, etc.

There are a few features that set Xera apart. First, is that you have the option to highlight documents and then print documents with or without those highlights. This is extremely important when you are getting ready for a deposition. Say you have 300 documents that you have pulled aside for a partner or senior associate to review for use as potential exhibits at an upcoming deposition. You view the document in the database, apply whichever tags you see fit, maybe leave a comment about why the document is important, and finally put it into a saved folder called “Documents for the Jackson Depo.” You print out all of those documents to give to the person who will take the depo. However, now you have to either explain which part of each document is relevant, or you have to review all of the documents again and highlight the relevant parts. With Xera, you can highlight the document as you read it the first time, and print a set with your highlights and a clean set to use as depo exhibits.

Xera also lets you look at large documents with thumbnails of each page. If you’ve got a 60-page color marketing brochure, loading each page could take forever. By loading the thumbnails, you can quickly scan the document to see if it will be helpful.

Another important feature is the ability to do internal e-mails to the document review team. A lot of complex litigation cases come with protective orders that call for the destruction/deletion of documents after the resolution of the case. If you hire a bunch of temporary document reviewers and, if they have a question about a particular document, they might download to their computer and then e-mail it to whoever is managing the document review. You now have two rogue copies of documents — one on the temporary employee’s hard drive and one in his sent items in his e-mail. After 10 months of document review and 15 such employees, the number of documents floating around in different people’s hard drives and Outlook folders is enough to cause concern. With Xera, you can prepare internal communications regarding documents and include links to those documents so nothing is downloaded and you don’t have to worry about confidential documents floating around on other people’s computers.

To host a document review project in Xera, find a vendor, such as OmniVere, who is no stranger to possible law firm liability traps in e-discovery.

Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on Twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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