Document Review Process DATASCRIBE LPO

What is Document Review?Document review is one of the stage in litigation process, including e-discovery process and EDRM.

It is the process of going through the case, analyzing the documents and data and identifying crucial information relevant to the legal case.

During this phase, attorney will review collection of data page wise, analyze technologically and manually to determine sensitive and non sensitive data relevant to the case.

Type of cases that require document review are:• Litigation• Mergers and Acquisitions• Government cases• Internal investigation

In litigation, documents are reviewed by attorney or legal professionals during ediscovery process, that is governed by rules of procedure.

The rules related to ediscovery process are Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 16, 26, 33, 34, 37 and 45.

FRCP was amended in 2006 to include electronically stored information (ESI).

Documents will be reviewed electronically that were generated electronically and stored on hard copy.

During this process, each document will be categorized according to relevant to the case, whether it is required for the discovery process-it may be needed to produce as a part of discovery, whether the information is confidential, whether it is privileged to attorney’s client or defendant.

When large volume of data is to be reviewed electronically, manual searching of the crucial information would be difficult as it may consume time. In this case document review software would be advisable to use that is known as platform.

As this process is time consuming, attorney’s often hire legal professionals or paralegals who have legal background or who have knowledge about legal system to do document review processing.

Attorney’s would also be hired to assist the document reviewers to make them understand about the processing.

In some other cases, usually law firms would outsource this process to other legal service providers such as legal process outsourcing firms which would be cost effective. They even outsource to other countries like India, Philippines, Australia.

Stages in Document Review Process

Legal team will conduct first review to analyze the documents relevant for the case and mark for the future use.

After analyzing the documents, legal team conducts second and more detailed review to determine which documents to consider and which documents to be withheld.

Documents will be withheld for various reasons. Some of them are mentioned below:

Relevance: Legal team will recheck the document to make sure whether the information relevant to the case. If the information is not relevance, it will be subjected to withheld.

Responsiveness: Team will the information whether it is beneficial to the opposing party. If it is so, then will be withheld.

Privilege:  They check is the information privilege to attorney-client. If it is not, then it would be withheld.

Confidential: If the information is confidential, then it should be excluded.

Based on the documents collected, the legal team will understand the vital information related to the case and start processing of the documents. Identify the key witness and will call for the trial.

To reduce the time and expense, many technologies have come up in the market for document review process.