Situation

Our client was required to undertake a review of over 100,000 documents as a part of a discovery review in a matter before the Supreme Court of New South Wales. It was their intention to have a first pass review conducted by a team of 12 paralegals. Certain documents from the first pass review would then be promoted to more experienced lawyers for further review. Our client had not conducted a review in this manner, at this scale, and required assistance in managing the review team.

Solution

We assigned a review management specialist to work with our client to ensure that this review was completed in the most efficient and effective manner possible. We established a workflow that saw batches of documents assigned to each individual reviewer. Each reviewer had been clearly briefed on their review objectives and processes. As the review progressed, we generated regular reports to help measure the review team’s performance (review rates, number of categories identified, privileged documents etc.). Any reviewer who performed higher or lower than the median was highlighted for further review, training, and assistance. As the second level review commenced, we were also able to report on those reviewers whose review decisions we regularly overturned by a senior reviewer and provide them with further guidance.

Impact

Our assistance in managing and overseeing the review allowed our client to:

• Closely track review progress and adjust to ensure deadlines were met and expectations managed

• Monitor, measure and improve review accuracy with reference to the reports we provided

• Identify good reviewer habits and practices, rolling them out to the wider review team

• Identify room for reviewer improvement and prioritise those team members for further training and oversight

• Determine team performance and those that could be allocated additional responsibility or more complex tasks