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Simple Tips to Speed Manual Review in eDiscovery

Oct 22, 2019

Relativity provides many helpful features that improve the eDiscovery review process, including Early Case Assessment and Data Analytics. These sophisticated tools substantially reduce the quantity of information requiring manual review, but they cannot eliminate the need for human review entirely. Fortunately, Relativity offers several simple functions that help reviewers move through the process more effectively and efficiently.

  1. Sort your batch. Often documents are batched in the order they appear in the workspace. However, batching by sort date and/or custodian may speed up manual review. Alternatively, emails can be batched by email thread group so emails from the same threads are together (if the review isn’t suppressing inferior email threads already).
  2. Family Propagation. Propagation can save time spent coding related documents. Enabling for responsiveness on a family level allows reviewers to tag a document as responsive and have the value propagate to that document’s family members. But understand the risks of propagation (e.g., overwriting previous coding).
  3. Document Skip. If document skip is enabled, Relativity removes from the queue any document after the current one that doesn’t meet the view or saved search criteria. If document skip and family propagation are used together, once a document is coded, the reviewer can move on to the next family. Document skip can be enabled or disabled at the individual user level.
  4. Copy from Previous. If there are many coding fields (or issue tags), it may be useful to enable Copy from Previous, which copies the coding from the previously coded and saved document to the current document. Relativity allows reviewers to add the Copy from Previous button to any document coding layout.
  5. Keyboard Shortcuts. Shortcuts are helpful for frequently used coding choices, including “copy from previous” and “save & next.” With keyboard shortcuts, reviewers can change viewer modes, populate choices, save edits, cancel edits, and move between and within documents.

Before starting manual review or for assistance using eDiscovery technologies, contact CDS for a consultation to discuss the best workflow for your project.

About the Author

Deerrun Jea

Deerrun Jea

Deerrun Jea is a CDS Product and Solutions Manager based in New York, focused on Convert and Vision. As a lawyer-technologist, he integrates the practice of law and the impact of technology, including advising both external and internal clients on workflows and strategies related to eDiscovery. He has over 20 years of legal and eDiscovery experience, including multidistrict litigation, FTC/DOJ second requests, and internal investigations.

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