Accurately predicting the status and expected completion of a document population is no easy task. Communicating the results clearly is also often a challenge. Fortunately, there are tools available to help with this task. One of the most helpful is a simple burndown chart, showing the outstanding work versus time. To make generating and tracking projections …
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February 23, 2016
How Contract Attorneys Should Approach Downtime
Because of the project-based nature of the work, contract attorneys must constantly consider the potential for downtime, both planned and unplanned. In the eDiscovery context, for example, preliminary searches may set expectations for a large, long-term project but skillful negotiation and adjustment of search terms (or the use of analytics), entire populations can disappear overnight. Suddenly, a …
Read MoreDecember 3, 2015
Getting Staffed
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, an angry DC document reviewer posted the following ad to Craigslist, a popular source of information about upcoming document review projects. I’ve redacted the agency’s name from the text, as it is not important for the discussion – similar situations can exist with almost any agency. DO NOT WORK WITH [REDACTED] …
Read MoreNovember 30, 2015
Black Friday eDiscovery Training Deals
This year several eDiscovery vendors have extended Black Friday / Cyber Monday / #eDiscoveryDay deals. The most attractive of the offerings is FTI’s offer of free Ringtail 8.5 certification, a value of up to $250. The programs offered are Reviewer I (for users who primarily review and code documents) and Reviewer II (for users who oversee …
Read MoreJanuary 4, 2015
Training a Review Team
The success of a document review project depends heavily on a successful training day. While the core members of the case team have likely been actively working on the matter for weeks or months, new team members will not start with the same level of knowledge and need to be quickly and efficiently brought up …
Read MoreSeptember 30, 2014
Keep Responsive and Privilege Separate
I’ve encountered a number of reviews recently where combining incompatible tags and enforcing (sometimes with automatic propagation) family coding resulted in mass confusion at production time. For example, responsiveness and privilege are separate logical concepts. Faced with a single-choice field containing Responsive, Non- Responsive, Privileged, Redact, and Unreadable, reviewers are uncertain how to code a …
Read MoreMay 29, 2014
TrueCrypt Security
TrueCrypt is one of the standard encryption tools used in eDiscovery to transport data – both coming from source material and in outgoing productions. It’s an incredibly easy-to-use, free, cross-platform tool that presents encrypted “containers” as drives that can be accessed on a local system. On Wednesday, May 28, 2014, the TrueCrypt SourceForge page was updated …
Read MoreMay 19, 2014
Hot Terms
In 2010, Anton Valukas at Jenner and Block issued a massive report in his capacity as examiner in the Lehman bankruptcy. The report was an incredibly in-depth review of the business and its failure, but also included a significant amount of detail about his methods and sources. The report disclosed that from three petabytes of available data, approximately …
Read MoreApril 25, 2014
Logikcull – An Amazing, Self-Service eDiscovery Experience
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to test a wide variety of document review platforms. Some, like Relativity and OmniX, seem to do a great job of solving certain review challenges, particularly in large projects. Some, which I won’t name, can be frustrating no matter the type and size of project. Others focus on …
Read MoreNovember 19, 2013
Quitting a Doc Review Project Early
Project schedules are always unpredictable. Populations and deadlines change, team members move faster or slower than expected, the database takes a nose dive on the Thursday before a production deadline or (my personal favorite) the day before you’re done, someone “finds” a population of data roughly the same size as what you just finished. When …
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