Document Review, Technology

How To Choose The Best Document Review Platform, Part 1

When you are planning a document review project, the selection of your document review platform is critical.

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When you are planning a document review project, the selection of your document review platform is critical. In a nutshell, document review is the process of organizing and categorizing large amounts of data to find the small percentage of documents that will end up as exhibits. The data is usually stored on an offsite server and is accessed through an online review platform. Although the coding of documents is usually pretty standard across platforms (a list of documents, a document viewer window, and a panel for your tags), the features that each platform has to help you organize your key docs for depositions, hearings, and trial are not the same.

Document Review Software — More Is Less

The Rand group did a study that found that in document review projects, the bulk of your expense (73%) is going to be spent on document reviewers. So, let’s put this into perspective. Say you have $100,000 to spend on your e-discovery case. In a typical scenario, you are going to spend $73,000 on your document reviewers and about $25,000 on the online document review software. Now, if you have a feature-rich document review tool that costs $30,000, but cuts your review time by a third, you are going to spend about $48,000 on document review, bringing your total project cost to about $80,000. In other words, by spending more on better review tools, you save about $20,000 in this scenario. Not all good software costs more, but even when it does, it’s usually because it’s worth it.

Coding Your Data Is Pointless If You Can’t Organize It Properly

It’s not just a cost difference. Better tools mean finding better evidence. If you’ve got a big pile of hay and you are looking for 20 or 30 needles, you can probably find a lot of them if you sort by hand. If you have some automated system for filtering out the non-important documents that you can run instantly or almost instantly, you’ll be able to find more hot documents faster. That will make a world of difference if you have a 30(b)(6) depo in a few weeks and you have not even finished a first level review of the documents, or if you have finished reviewing all of the documents for a deponent and you still have 3,000 documents marked as hot for that witness and need to narrow down your list of documents to bring to the deposition. You need to have better tools to find the documents you need, and you need to have them at your fingertips.

A linear review is when you start at page one and review documents in order until you reach the end. A non-linear review is when you review documents out of order by grouping them together with certain criteria to find your hot documents faster. A good document review tool will let you do both.

In this series, I want to discuss some features that you should be looking for when choosing a document review platform by looking at several platforms in detail and showing you how to best use them to help your document review project.

Sponsored

Viewpoint

Robert Chuey at Claritas Data Solutions has the following to say about Viewpoint:

Viewpoint is unique in that it is a fully integrated offering which includes collection, early case assessment, processing, Advanced Analytics, Assisted Review, linear review, and production within a single environment.   A key component of Viewpoint is there are no third party applications utilized at any stage of the data lifecycle as all functionality is embedded within the platform.   Additionally, the flexibility of Viewpoint allows permission based access to features like; personalized screen layouts, tiff on the fly redactions, document review audit trail, drag & drop organization as well as filtering on metadata, key terms, and work product.

In sum, Viewpoint is a tool that allows you to create filtered subsets of documents called “views.” For example, you can create a view that contains all e-mails from January 1, 2004, through December 31, 2008, from “Nathan Jessup” and to “Harold Dawson” and contain the keyword “Code Red.” Once you have created that view, you can sort the documents by date, e-mail subject, or any other type of data that is embedded in your documents. Your keywords are automatically highlighted in the documents. You can save your search results as an excel spreadsheet to view all of the data about the search results.

Viewpoint Power Tools

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Viewpoint has a number of built in tools to help you find better evidence faster. The Assisted Review tool allows you to code a small subset of documents. The system then analyzes key words and phrases in your subset to find patterns on why each document was coded the way it was. It then applies those patterns to your entire document set. It won’t be perfect, but most of the time, it will be as good or better than what you will get out of a group of fatigued and rushed document reviewers.

The e-mail thread analyzer groups e-mails together and shows you where e-mails in the chain are missing.

The Near Dupe tool allows you to create a redline version of two documents that appear to be similar. If you have a draft of a contract sent to the CEO by corporate employee A, and CEO forwards it to corporate employee B, you can compare the e-mail attachments to see if the CEO changed anything.

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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