The Basics of E-Discovery: Review

What Is E-Discovery Review?

When we think about e-discovery, we most often think about the review phase of the electronic discovery reference model, or EDRM. The review phase consists of three different components. It is reviewing the documents, analyzing the documents to determine whether they're responsive or non-responsive to the request, and then producing them to the other side. It is typically the most labor-intensive and expensive portion of the e-discovery process.

Who Conducts Document Review?

Your typical review team can be comprised of attorneys, paralegals, and associates. The work of review can be done in house by corporate counsel, or it can be sourced out to outside counsel. Often that is determined by the infrastructure of in house legal team. But regardless of who's doing it, staying on top of the trends in the legal industry and the technology that is available can help you reduce costs.

Why Is Review So Expensive?

Often there is a “data dump,” and teams have to review far more non-responsive documents than they should. A lot of times people are not bringing in the right players to review the documents. A lack of collaboration during review, making sure that everybody's on the same page can also slow down the process.

Additionally, review can be very costly if you're not using the right technology. For example, you wouldn’t go to the Yellow Pages today and flip through page by page to find something. And that's not what you should be doing during document review either. Legal teams should leverage technology to comb through those documents very quickly.

What Role Does Technology Play in Review?

Technology plays a huge role in document review. Teams should be using industry-leading features that are available during review. These tools make up what is known as technology-assisted review, or TAR. Basically it's a group of different features such as:

• Threading: seen everyday on our smartphone, where related emails are grouped together and users can read the whole thread at one time
• Visualization: Pie charts and other data visualizations present high-level information about responsiveness and use technology to immediately retrieve relevant documents
• Artificial intelligence: Used in everyday life by web search engines, Netflix, and Amazon, it recommends likely matches to expedite finding responsive data

If you’d like to learn more about the review phase of the EDRM, we have lots of great resources available, including our Comprehensive Guide to E-Discovery Review. And next week in this blog series, we’ll get an introduction to the concepts of Predictive Coding and Artificial Intelligence as well.