Advances in electronic data discovery are now producing copious amounts of documents in litigation. All of these files must be either reviewed or culled out as nonresponsive. Although the future may bring predictive coding algorithms to find responsive documents, contract attorney review of documents is still the dominant methodology, and it can be very expensive. Here are 10 tips for managing contract attorneys.
1. Privilege law: One of the most important aspects of any document review is holding onto privileged documents. Because your contract attorneys will be the eyes on your documents, they must be able to identify potentially privileged documents. Each participating attorney must be trained about privilege rules. Test your attorneys via sample documents that would qualify as potentially privileged during first-level review. Hint: Create a document with the names of all the privileged parties for each case and revise as necessary.
