4 Ways to Boost Ediscovery Efficiency
Last year, we described four tips that could save you time and money during ediscovery. A recent BDO study of inside counsel shows that the importance of efficiency has not changed: almost half of those surveyed expected that the escalating cost of ediscovery would have a significant impact on their companies. To address that challenge, here are four more ways you can make your ediscovery process more efficient:
1) Create a Chronology During Review
Once you’ve found your key documents, you’re going to need to organize them – to prepare for depositions and to map out your strategy. One time suck is doing this after instead of during review. By tackling the two sequentially, you lose time backtracking and looking at the same documents many times.
Another issue with this approach is the overhead of using multiple tools: first, you look at documents in a review platform, and then, you organize those same documents in a case mapping tool or spreadsheet. This often means time lost downloading and uploading the documents multiple times, worrying about lost notes, and sending file versions back and forth.
Better: Save time by using a tool like Everlaw’s built-in Chronology. Add relevant documents as you’re reviewing, instantly organizing key docs and removing the costs of using multiple tools. By proactively building your case with the highest efficiency, you avoid having to reactively manage timelines and budgets.
2) Don’t Tag or Code Individual Documents
With the volume of responsiveness documents increasing so quickly, one-by-one document review becomes unrealistic. At every step of the process, you need to act on many documents at once to keep costs and timelines in check. Whether you’re coding and rating documents or adding them to deposition outlines, being able to batch these tasks increases efficiency. By grouping and collectively labeling duplicates or related documents, you can speedily remove irrelevant or duplicative content.
Better: Use ediscovery-specific “macros” or shortcuts to act on many documents at once. For example, Everlaw offers “batch coding”, a collection of actions applied to many documents with a single keystroke, and “coding presets,” which enable you to apply many categories and codes at once.
3) Redact Data Consistently
Reviewing for privilege doesn’t have to involve nightmares about clawback agreements or rabbit’s feet. Redaction can feel arbitrary or needlessly difficult. The fear is understandable: after all, how can you effectively search for personally identifiable information (PII) values across a document set, when each value is unique? And even if you can find the documents with these pieces of information, you can lose time looking for each mention within long documents.
Better: Improve efficiency with programmatic redaction tools. For instance, Everlaw can redact each instance of a specific term within a document simultaneously; no need to drag black boxes over each instance. It also has a PII tool that finds common patterns – like emails, phone numbers, or social security numbers – and highlights them across your document set.
4) Get Going Immediately
Each case has multiple parties, often in different locations or working on different components, and you have more than one case. That means a lot of remembering the context and progress of each case every time you log in, a big mental drain. Moreover, there often isn’t a good way to evaluate high-level progress or to see the work of a specific team or step; compiling that kind of information can be a resource drain. And those team members may struggle to start their days, taking time to figure out the next step among all of the case components and instructions.
Better: An easy-to-use dashboard can solve this kind of efficiency problem. For example, Everlaw’s Compact View lets you see only favorited or recent items, so you can immediately spot your most timely tasks – which means fewer things fall through the cracks.
Learn more about how you can boost your document review efficiency.
