BEST PRACTICES TO STREAMLINE DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
Emails, electronic documents, paper documents, transcripts, motion papers, and more – the volume of digital material before the courts is growing and creating new document management challenges for legal teams. With the rise of globalisation and the reliance on interconnectivity between staff on different continents, the logistical burdens can be daunting and costly.
Whether a small hearing or a multinational trial, advances in technology are streamlining legal processes, cultivating collaboration and enabling intuitive and efficient document management. Their accuracy, thoroughness and speed helps review teams access and transform data into strategies that shape the course of a case.
The first step in effectively managing documents is to minimise them. Document review is extremely tedious, especially in large cases with massive volumes of data. A great deal of time, money and manpower is spent culling through non-responsive documents. In traditional linear reviews, people make mistakes or miss key information when tasked with reviewing thousands of documents day in and day out, and it can be incredibly time consuming. Analytical tools such as email threading, predictive coding and near-duplicate analysis help attorneys significantly reduce data volume and save time and costs, in a thoroughly defensible manner.
Email comprises approximately 80 percent of e-discovery data during review. Email threading is proven to reduce the volume of documents that need review by one-third to one-half, by grouping related messages that may not otherwise appear together in the same thread. The software removes repetitive content and reconstructs entire conversations to produce the most ‘inclusive email’. From replies to forwards to attachments, one reviewer is able to assess the entire chain of a communication, rather than multiple reviewers each assessing different components without seeing the big picture. This creates consistency and makes it possible to code full email chains as being relevant, non-responsive or privileged.
Jul-Sep 2018 issue
Epiq