The Ugly Truth about Document Review

At its best, document review is a long and laborious process intended to find relevant (and hopefully dispositive) documents for your litigation or investigation. At its worst, document review is a remote, expensive, time-consuming, and not very revealing look into the facts of your case.

A good document review depends on the intersection of people, process, and technology. One can’t win at the expense of the others. Most corporate counsel pass document review off to outside counsel, who often outsource it to other (domestic or international) vendors and document review teams. All of this can remove corporate counsel from the actual review process. To get a closer look at what is really going on in the review room, I interviewed half a dozen reviewers.

Review Room Conditions

Do you know if the reviewers are working in a room that looks more like the Taj Mahal or an outhouse with a dirt floor? Since good working conditions are important for comfort, efficiency, and satisfaction, I asked about:

• Space: Reviewer 3 said, “When you feel like you’re one of 100 people crammed into a room that has a capacity of 50, it just causes general angst and makes reviewers less productive and more rebellious.”
• Amenities: I have seen review rooms where no food or drinks were allowed. In one review, we brought in a coffee maker, which was promptly removed by the person in charge. Reviewers actually appreciate a setting where amenities are provided, whether it is popcorn in the afternoon or a stocked drink refrigerator.
• Comfort: Reviewer 4 mentioned that he was in a document review where, “We were inches from each other, sitting in chairs that somehow survived from the ‘80′s.” Not that every document reviewer needs the latest Herman Miller chair, but comfortable seats do matter, especially for document reviewer efficiency.
• Equipment: Dual monitors reduce eye-strain and increase efficiency. On the down side, Reviewer 1 was in a review where dual monitors were being used to stream Netflix and Hulu on one monitor while they reviewed documents on the other, maintaining a review pace of 60 documents per hour, so some supervision may be required.