Most people who went through law school in recent years are saddled with significant debt. If you’re not, be thankful. If you are, it’s often difficult to discuss how best to handle addressing this massive debt, particularly if making payments is difficult due to sporadic employment or low pay. Even with full time jobs along the …
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February 24, 2016
The Basics of eDiscovery
The team at Exterro has assembled an incredibly helpful group of resources with their “Basics of E-Discovery” website. They’ve broken the entire process into several chapters and even included a helpful list of external resources (including my site) for additional learning. Each day, numerous attorneys find themselves facing new challenges as they work to address eDiscovery …
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 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 MoreNovember 20, 2013
Asking Questions During Training
This morning, Above The Law posted seven tips for new contract attorneys. Take a moment to look over their list and explanations; generally, it contains some good advice. Their second tip, “Don’t ask hypothetical questions”, is particularly wise. Use the question time after a training to clarify any confusing or conflicting information provided in training. …
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 …
Read MoreNovember 18, 2013
Why Can’t I Use My Cell Phone During Doc Review?
New reviewers often express frustration about the number of rules involved in document review. Review attorneys are generally quite intelligent and hardworking people – being told what to wear or what to do seems, for many, insulting. Rules are necessary, though, because not everyone conducts themselves in a way that respects everyone working around them. …
Read MoreNovember 7, 2013
Internet Archive Scanning Center Fire – Donations Needed
The internet provides an amazing ability for immediate change. As new information is available, sites can be updated, documents republished and content refreshed to reflect new information. I first encountered the Internet Archive when I needed to be able to demonstrate what had been removed from a website. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine was ready and …
Read MoreJuly 24, 2013
The Importance of Affirmative Tags
Designing an effective, intuitive coding layout is not always as easy as it seems. Often, the choices made in coding selections will color the ultimate work product, so much care and attention goes into crafting specific issue codes and responsiveness instructions that distill various requests into easily understood components. That list will then circulate through …
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