Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team: Use the Team’s Knowledge
March 03, 2011
The document review effort is the litigation team’s first in-depth exposure to the client’s electronic documents. The review staff will have more exposure to a broader range of documents than anyone else on the team, at least in the beginning of the case. When you are using contract reviewers, they will go away when the review is completed. You don’t want to lose what they’ve learned when the project is over, so you should take some steps to use their knowledge. Here are two things you can do:
- Ask for summary memos: Ask supervisors on the project to prepare a summary memo for each custodian. To get good summary information you should provide specific instructions for the information you would like included. You could, for example, ask for this information about each custodian:
- A description of the types of documents in the collection (for example, letter, monthly reports, work sheets, and so on).
- A description of the general topics that are covered.
- An approximate date range of the documents in the custodian’s files.
- A list of key individuals (and organizations) with whom the custodian frequently corresponds.
- Interview the review team: Meet periodically with the group. Spend an hour at the end of a workday and interview them about what they are seeing in the collection. If there are certain topics you are hoping to see covered in the documents, ask the team about them. Likewise, if there are certain topics that you hope not to see, ask about those as well. This type of exchange will serve three purposes:
- It will give senior litigation team members useful information about the document collection.
- It will be useful for review team members to learn about what other team members are seeing.
- It’s great for team morale. It really reinforces that their work is important and that their input is valuable.
What steps do you take to make use of what the review team learns in the document review? Do you have suggestions you can share with us?
This concludes our blog series on Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team. I hope you found it useful!
Please share any comments you have and let us know if you’d like to know more about an eDiscovery topic.
