Contract Coders: e-Discovery’s “Wasting Asset”?

http://ow.ly/7tzpp

This is a guest blog post by Lawrence C. Chapin on the e-Discovery Team Blog of Ralph Losey.

This article discusses attorney document review processes and addresses certain issues related to that topic. The article states, "Recently, the mainstream media has joined the chorus of lament, with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times finding common cause in reporting the sad state of document reviewer affairs. The Journal portrayed their work as a last resort, the only port for discouraged lawyers in the current economic storm. Even in the growing field of discovery, it was a place for lawyers with shrinking hopes. The Times chimed in that however dim the personal prospects were for lawyers doing the work, there was only going to be less of it as software increasingly took their place."

The article provides a detailed analysis of the attorney-review process, and cites recent studies that were conducted to garner information about those practices.  There are many suggestions for how the process can be improved set forth in the article.

The author further sates, "For now, document reviewers remain largely uncounted, except as an unavoidable cost. This remains true – despite what we have learned about the importance of cross-disciplinary teamwork to e-discovery success, and despite what our own intuition tells us about the importance of team awareness to team work."