Should You Outsource Managed Document Review

Managed document review can aid you in your discovery process prior to a trial. As opposed to the discovery process after a trial, of course. Discovery is a critical part of any legal case, but in large corporate or class action cases, discovery can be extremely involved. If Bill Gates or Warren Buffet happen to be your client, cost isn't an issue, but most of us aren't fortunate enough to represent individuals with bottomless pockets. Inevitably the question arises, should you cut cost on discovery and allocate more resources to trying cases.

One the face of it, this would seem foolish. A key piece of evidence unearthed in discovery can decide a case. Not finding that key piece of evidence could result in a loss, or higher damages.

Often times in a large case there are so many documents to be reviewed that lawyers or paralegals cannot do because the client won't pay for so many billable hours.

This is where managed document review can be a big help. Document review work is farmed out to a vendor which charges much lower hourly rates than an atto
ey. They are given precise instructions which tell them what they are looking for, and what they don't need to worry about. They find the useful information and ignore the rest, forwarding the only documents that are truly important to your legal team.

Managed document review is not without some risks. If a client is clearly wrong but fighting a case anyway, letting strangers view sensitive documents is foolish. Also, intelligence of reviewers is key. Smarter reviewers are needed, but are obviously pricier.

Inexpensive managed review is impractical for some technical subjects like science. As only scientists can understand such documents, and they are expensive, their review of documents is costly. In this situation, even lawyers cannot review documents, so experts must be used, but there is no cost savings.

Second world nations such as India have document review companies that charge but a fraction of U.S. counterparts, but they can be a mixed blessing. Documents must be scanned to be transferred rapidly overseas by electronic means, and there are always security conce
s in such transferals. Shipping is a slow process.

An increasingly popular form document review is scanning or digitization. Documents are scanned using high speed scanners, optical character recognition is run, and then keyword searches can be performed on thousands or more documents. The value of such searches is limited, in that they are not intelligent, and cannot understand the text the way a reader can. Sometimes there is no substitute for reading reams of documents.

It is easy to say that managed document review is unprofitable. Why not just bill the client more, right? But a markup can be charged for the service, or the client could not be told that the process was farmed out, and could be billed at normal legal rates.