As Kate's team proceeds with review of the thousands of documents produced by Synchromotive, they are finding themselves bogged down by the number of irrelevant documents that were included in the production. They are also finding that the production is filled with duplicate documents, simply because in the course of business, copies of certain items were distributed to many people in the

Question

company. These excess pages are causing them to waste valuable time, and are making their client run up hours of unnecessary legal fees in the review process. How can Kate's team save time by quickly eliminating unrelated or duplicate documents? Provide specific examples of how these methods can be used in the case.

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The documents can be reduced to a reasonable number through filtering—the process of scanning or searching the documents. Duplicate documents can be quickly eliminated through the process of de-duping. However, this process must be done carefully since even though some documents may appear to be identical, there may be details that distinguish them. For example, e-mails may seem to have identical content, but different recipients. The recipient is still important because it shows who had the information. Once the duplicates are eliminated, the team can electronically code documents. Objective coding can sort documents based on bibliographic information such as date, author, or type of document. In this case, Kate's team may want to eliminate documents created before a certain date well before either device was invented. Using subjective coding, Kate's team can sort documents based on key words. For example, they can pull all the documents that make reference to the Speedex device.