How To Review A Document

Dear Legal Document Reviewers,

It's an arduous and all too often thankless task for you to mindlessly thumb through pages and pages of someone else's legal troubles, occasionally interrupted by an amusing photograph or, more rarely, the smoking gun.

It's made more frustrating by the odd technical interruption to the platform. "The spinning wheel of doom" or some other random error.

As it's nearly Christmas and to make up for my contribution to those situations here are some useful tips, slightly more technical in nature than you might find in your average training or on-boarding to a review. With immense thanks to Melina Efstathiou for the excellent personal insights from a hugely experienced professional.

Feel free to add them to your document review guidance notes :)

1. Refer to Multiple views

This is so, so so important. Even if it's just a cursory glance to confirm the information in the native document, extracted text of a document and imaged version of a document are broadly the same in content. The reason is that so often, even for simple types of data, the different views of a document can reveal extra information.

I have had many occurances of data where the images, text and native document are ALL substantially different in content. Be wary of this.

Sometimes it^s possible to download the native document and open it in the native application, which can give you a much better understanding of the document if that's allowed.

2. Understand the Metadata

Metadata - what is this weird notion? Make sure you are comfortable with understanding the information contained within various fields which can help you understand the document more clearly and when in doubt, ALWAYS ASK! No question is ever silly or unnecessary. 

3. You may not see exactly what the recipients saw.

Your eyes don't lie, but remember, what you are seeing is the result of multiple technology processes being applied. Therefore the information on screen may not be the same as the information seem by the author, sender or recipients. As an example, some email archiving systems will cut the body of the email and leave a small part of the text of the email behind, or worse still a generic placeholder. Mobile phone data may look entirely different in the document review platform than it did to the recipients. Just keep that in mind as you whizz through.

4. Redactions and other efficiencies

A significant pain point even in the 21st Century... In Switzerland there is a heavy emphasis on privacy and banking secrecy. As a result I am not in the eDiscovery industry in Switzerland I'm in the Redaction industry. Being aware of the technical possibilities and customisations that exist will help prevent the onset of RSI. Automation of redactions can save significant time and effort and there is less and less excuse to avoid these technologies.

Automated entity recognition and name matching technologies (most platforms have their own versions of this) can identify and bulk redact with a significant level of accuracy, along with decent sampling and quality control, can turn a 4 week exercise into a 4 day one.

"But this just won't work with massive excel files" I hear you say...

“Redacting excels has become the number one difficulty for all review teams, due to the complex nature of the file type. Being able to redact them natively is the key solution. Always ensure that there are no hidden rows / columns that the other side can still have access to “ says Melina Efstathiou of Eversheds Sutherland

There are many decent technologies out there including Exolution, Blackout and XLerator, which can eliminate significant effort. Discuss these technologies with your review team lead and try to understand why they are not being utilised.

Duplicates and near-duplicates: Melina continues: You will most likely see duplicate versions of a document as full families get published and therefore you will end up with an attachment twice if part of a different family. Consult with the Team Lead as to whether all duplicates must be tagged consistently even when part of different families. This will be a huge time-saver when we reach productions later in the project lifecycle.

If you are not using predictive coding (continuous active learning or any technology assisted review), someone is trying to make your life harder. Raise these technologies at the outset of your project. Find out what the planned use of them is.

5. Flagging hidden content

By this I mean that many modern software applications allow content that is not always visible to the reader of the document. For instance: hidden rows and columns in Excel, Tracked Changes in Word.

Ask and get confirmation whether they are visible in the review platform that you are and where best to locate such information - possibly in the metadata fields.

6. Building up a glossary

Glossaries of terms, particularly on longer running projects, can be a great part of the on-boarding and training process and add to the general understanding of the language used by the client/custodians. As you go make a note of frequently used non-standard terms and feed these back to the team lead.

7. Group similar document types

This is an often overlooked approach to speed up review. For instance, it's often faster to have a small set of reviewers focus on 'problematic documents' such as large excel files, CAD drawings or Mobile phone data. Sometimes these types of document require additional steps. Therefore reviewing them together can often lead to extra efficiencies. If you are noticing certain document types that require a particular methodology to understand or review, suggest grouping them together to your review team lead.

8. Follow up on technical issues

Don't just rely on the technical issue tag, make sure that the issues you notice are resolved by proactively following up with your team lead or project manager. It is tempting to rely on the operations or project team to resolve these issues and feed them back into review or report them to the client. But unfortunately I've seen many times this not being done in a timely manner.

9. Be sure of time zones and other inconsistencies

Unfortunately many technical teams and software providers still regularly get this wrong. The Metadata, native, text and tiff image should all be displaying the same date and time and you should be aware of the time zones where the information was sent or received. In some cases verifying this information can a key part of the matter. Pay particular attention to the hours, minutes and seconds, do they match? If not, flag it as a technical issue to the doc review manager.

If you notice that a certain file / document has information that is in itself conflicting e.g. a document that was created after the date it was sent, or sent by an email address that does not match the custodian's name, please flag this out immediately to the doc review manager. 

10. Document, document, document.

The process of capturing the information you are reviewing has often been performed in a Forensic manner, This is typically so if questions arise, someone is able to testify to the accuracy and appropriatness of the collection of data. Your document review should be performed in a similar manner, using contemporaneous notes of issues, progress, questions and answers. These need to be retained for future reference. They are a great learning aid for future reviews for the same or even other clients.

There's my top 10, enhanced greatly by the contributions of Melina....

If you're in litigation support, ediscovery or an allied field and have some other ideas to add, please feel free to leave them in the comments!

Merry Christmas and a Happy 2020. May you land a juicy and interesting contract where your mobile phone is allowed and there's a decent cafeteria.

Disclaimer: This is all my own opinion and experience (or the opinon and experience of any contributor) and isn't reflective of the views of my (or their) current or previous employers. I love document review teams and I don't envy the work they do. I would relish the opportunity to rewind time and study law. Seriously.

About Martin: Over the past 17 years I've worked with Chief Legal Officers, General Counsel, Compliance Professionals and ‘Big Law’ firms globally, to provide, create and implement systems and processes that reduce the likelihood of failure during a crisis.