Litigation Support: How to Create an Effective Guidance Document for eDiscovery
Document review is a necessary, but often labor-intensive and time-consuming, part of litigation support. Preparing an effective guidance document can help avoid costly errors and frustrating missteps by guiding the ediscovery team to evaluate critical information more efficiently. Ensuring that your guidance document includes the following elements can improve the effectiveness of the document review process:
- Overview of the legal matter. Provide enough information before beginning the process so the litigation support team understands the legal issues in your case and how the document review process fits into the overall case strategy.
- Relevant background information. It can also be helpful for the ediscovery team to have access to the subpoena, complaint, or other document requests, so they can see the context for the document requests they are responding to.
- Responsiveness and issue coding specifications. Provide an overview of the responsiveness categories and the document coding options you want reviewers to use for consistency and cohesiveness during the review process. You should also include why those issue codes are relevant to the case. This can reduce or eliminate instances of inconsistent document coding and minimize the changes needed during the quality control process. .
- Privileged documents. Provide information to help the litigation support team understand how to identify privileged information. This may include the names of any members of the legal department, and the names of outside law firms that have provided counsel to the parties and any agents working on their behalf. This can help ensure privilege is asserted accurately and consistently.
- Expectations. Finally, it is critical that anyone handling litigation support for your law firm or corporate legal department understands your expectations in terms of deliverables and time frame. Spelling these out upfront in a guidance document can ensure there are no miscommunications later in the process and ensure that document discovery is completed effectively and on time.
Baer Reed provides a full range of LPO services to law firms and corporate legal departments around the world, including litigation support services. To learn more, call us at 888-433-1990, or contact us online today.
- On October 2, 2020
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