ARTICLE | Managing the Outsourced Document Review Project
08/15/17
Originally published in The Business Suit, the newsletter of the Commercial Litigation Committee of the Defense Research Institute (DRI), vol. 21, no. 4 (August 15, 2017)
With the proliferation of electronic discovery and the large volume of documents gathered for complex matters, the use of review teams staffed by contract attorneys has become commonplace.
Indeed, client demands and court schedules often make the use of temporary document review assistance inevitable. This article describes suggested protocols and best practices that you, the supervising attorney, should consider adopting when managing a review project staffed by contract attorneys (throughout this article, the terms “contract attorneys” and “reviewers” will be used interchangeably to refer to attorneys assigned to work on a document review project who are not employees of the supervising attorney’s firm or organization). Although this article briefly notes some of the ethical issues that arise when using contract attorneys, it is not intended to be comprehensive on that subject and other sources should be consulted.