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Tier 1 ReviewSM: Reducing the Number of Documents Reviewed by Attorneys

Privilege and responsiveness review is the most expensive phase of most litigations. On average, review eats up 75% to 90% of the overall case budget, dwarfing even electronic discovery costs. In theory, reducing this expense is quite simple: Reduce the number of documents that must be reviewed by legal professionals at high hourly rates.

As a practical matter, it’s not that simple. Any document not reviewed is, of course, not produced, which means the legal team had better be sure it’s not responsive. ACT has developed a combination of processes and supportive technologies that allow the legal team to reliably and defensibly remove non-responsive documents/data from a collection. We call this “Tier 1 ReviewSM and it’s a new application of the same basic principles every litigator used in the days before electronic documents were pervasive.”

ACT Tier 1 ReviewSM

In the spring of 2002, ACT was asked by one of its law firm clients to look for creative means to reduce document processing and review costs for a large electronic discovery collection. By applying our industry expertise to these discussions, we recalled that in the “old days”–before most discovery documents were electronic documents–attorneys would simply take a look at a with custodian’s filing system and immediately rule out entire file folders if it was obvious from the label or a quick scan of the contents that the documents were not responsive. We quickly determined that if the attorneys could review an index of a custodian’s documents, effectively an electronic version of the old file folder process, whole folders and directories might be eliminated from further processing and review.

ACT made the pre-processed documents/data available to the attorney on copies of the hard drives. Two of the law firm’s attorneys traveled to ACT’s offices, spent a few days reviewing those hard drives and eliminated only those documents and data that were obviously irrelevant. The end analysis showed a reduction in data of approximately 80%, resulting in a savings of over $1 million in ACT’s processing fees alone.

From this experience, ACT began a development effort to make the process more user-friendly and provide greater safeguards for data integrity. The resulting solution, Tier 1, begins with a cataloging process that inventories every file on a media (hard drive, DVD, CD-ROM, etc.). From this point, ACT can provide complete audit trails as to the status and whereabouts of every file, from review through production.