In modern litigation, more and more cases involve massive volumes of electronic data at the discovery phase, leaving legal teams to wade through a sea of documents to uncover relevant evidence. All this noise in the data can slow down document review and increase the chances for error, which makes it all the more important to stick to a streamlined strategy.

Recently, we shared an excerpt from our white paper on ediscovery document review that laid out the key strategies for planning an effective review process. Today, we dive deeper into the tactics that will guarantee efficiency and accuracy in document review. For more document review tips, download the full white paper here.

Step 1: Set Up Your Coding Panel

“Review” refers to the assessment of documents for relevance to a discovery request. “Coding” refers to the process of reviewing documents and summarizing key elements in a structured format. Developing a coding or tagging screen requires analysis of the issues in the case as well as an evaluation of the search capabilities of the review database. Coding screens typically contain data fields for responsive or nonresponsive, privileged, confidentiality levels, and key documents.

Many document review platforms also allow users to create custom coding fields. Here are some common designations you may want to include in your coding panel:

• Responsiveness: Responsive, Non-Responsive, For Further Review
• Core Issues: Case Related Topics and Key Themes
• Privilege: Privileged - Attorney Client, Work Product, Consulting Expert, Proprietary, Not Privileged
• Confidentiality: Attorneys Eyes Only, Confidential, Highly Confidential
• Importance: Hot, Warm and Cold
• Admin: Attorney Notes, Privilege Log Notes

Step 2: Divide Data Into Review Sets

The complexity of the case will have a direct impact on the breadth and cost of ediscovery. If your case includes a large volume of electronic data (as most cases do today), one of the first steps in the document review process is to create review sets. When organizing the review data into sets, it’s important to ask certain questions when creating them. These questions include:

• Whose information is it?
• What was the search criteria used to locate the information?
• Do the documents appear to fit the criteria used?
• How is the information organized?
• What are the lawyers’ priorities?

Your document review must be accurate, repeatable, and defensible. When you are reviewing the data sets you must make sure to analyze the efficiency and accuracy of search terms. Documents that “hit” on search terms must be reviewed. If too many irrelevant documents are being returned, you are experiencing “noise,” also commonly referred to as “false positive” search results.

Search criteria must be refined, optimized and tweaked to get the desired results, and results should return relevant information that needs to be reviewed. Time, money and perhaps even the case can be saved with an efficient and effective search.

Narrow the search if too many irrelevant documents are found, broaden the search if too few relevant documents are found, add or remove search terms, and explore and use a variety of tools to locate responsive documents with minimal false positive search results.

It is critical to maintain a record or a copy of the material that was not captured initially for review, so that any additional ESI to be reviewed can be taken exclusively from this subset of the entire data set.

Step 3: Maintain a Privilege Log

A privilege log is a report that describes documents or other items withheld from production in a civil lawsuit under claims such as attorney-client privilege, work product doctrine, or trade secrets. The log identifies the specific files being withheld and contains sufficient information to describe the documents including author, date, type of document, distribution list, and a high level description of subject matter of the document.

The privilege log will also record the type of privilege asserted for each item. This log must be produced so that the opposition may challenge the assertion of privilege, in the hopes of having the document(s) produced.

In order to build an effective privilege log, there are a few steps you should follow:

• Counsel: Counsel should review the court’s requirements for a privilege log (e.g., level of detail needed, specific information).
• Review Team: Since the review team understands the facts and documents, they should be involved with the privilege log’s creation.
• Tools: Your ediscovery tool should allow you to easily produce the privilege log if you used its privilege description field when you reviewed the document population. Then counsel can simply fine-tune the privilege log.
• Quality Control: Quality control and transparency (i.e. workflow, how the documents were identified, and collection methods) is essential to provide the needed level of defensibility to the privilege log.

Step 4: Conduct Quality Control

Quality control and due diligence should be performed at every stage of the review process to ensure consistent and accurate document designation. The review platform should be able to apply quality control restrictions such as propagating tagging to duplicate documents and families of documents such as threaded emails and attachments.

Include a second level review of all designated production documents (or a sample of them) by senior attorneys and randomly review the team’s coding to check for inconsistencies. You should also assemble complete records of the discovery process including details of the collection, processing, review, and production for future reference. Under FRCP Rule 30, the opposing party can seek discovery regarding your processes and workflows.

Quality control is especially crucial for privilege review. The more electronic data reviewers have to parse through in a case, the higher the chance a piece of privileged material is overlooked, resulting in an inadvertent disclosure and loss of privilege. Be sure to provide all reviewers with a list of people and topics that may involve privilege, which they can reference during the initial review and double check during quality control.