At times the electronic document reviewing process is stressful and a costly affair. However, reviewing documents can be something other than horror or extremely expensive. You can improve your system and see significant gains by enhancing your search criteria, optimizing your document review procedure, and eliminating waste.
Steps For A Leaner Document Evaluation Protocol
Avoid Getting Entangled In Arguments About Search Terms
Some attorneys struggle over agreements with the opposing counsel for months. Their method generates numerous search phrase iterations, each of which consumes the time of both the attorney and the technician while ultimately lowering the count by one or two percent.
Examine Your Time Management
If your company is like most others, selecting search keywords and haggling with opposing counsel account for a sizable portion of your e-discovery expenses. Measure the amount of time you spend reviewing documents.
Consider ROI
Even after accounting for hosting and analytics costs, document reviewing costs can be drastically reduced by using advanced analytics to swiftly screen out non-responsive files at a fraction of the cost. Instead of investing additional time, money, and effort into all-too-often unsuccessful search term negotiations, it is more cost-effective and frequently more accurate to let machine learning algorithms process a more significant set of documents. Without getting mired down in minute specifics, the opposing parties should settle on some fundamental search phrases and put them through analytics first. It’s best to load one million and a half documents even if you’re already loading a million because this will save you time when negotiating conditions.
Keep A Check On Issue Codes
Issue codes are tags used to group documents into categories so that the legal team may more easily manage them and locate them later. In a single case, counsel requests 30, 40, or even more codes much too frequently, hoping that they will aid in better arranging depositions, fact summaries, and the like. Although using that many tags is undoubtedly a possibility, it is seen that using more than 8–10 tags frequently slows the review process and unnecessarily increases expenditures, with minimal benefit. Most review systems are more effective now than problem coding due to the availability and advancement of analytical tools. Even though this can seem trivial, if a reviewer has to make 30 or 40 tagging choices for every document instead of 8-10, your chances of reducing document review costs are limited to none.
Remove Unnecessary Attachments
Consider an email with a sender’s signature and a spreadsheet with the firm logo, social media icons, and links to each site. Those logos and icons are theoretical attachments, but for e-discovery, they shouldn’t be. The majority of current legal data processing systems can prevent such pointless logos icons from being included in the data promoted for inspection and saves the firm some money and time.
Conclusion
In the current business world, more law firms rely on cutting-edge legal technology, supported by dedicated and qualified partners, to cut costs, shorten document review times, and add client value. By keeping the pointers mentioned above in mind, you may accomplish these goals quickly, safely, affordably, and efficiently.