Whenever there is a legal proceeding, the attorneys and legal teams for the plaintiffs and defendants in a case, or even for various entities in a merger or acquisition, have a legal right as well as a duty to review all relevant documents that may provide evidence or information.
As you can imagine, all the relevant documents can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands of documents, contracts, agreements, policies, emails and communications in any written form. This process is known as a document review. Consequently, document review can be an incredibly costly part of the discovery process if a company or a legal team doesn’t know where to turn.
Outsourcing Possibilities
Rather than tie up the in-house or the hired legal team, smart attorneys and companies are turning to outsourcing for the document review process. The outsourcing is often done to reviewing companies located outside of the United States and, as the documents are in electronic format, they can be easily and securely shared.
The best companies offering this type of document review process will use proprietary software to identify specific keywords, phrases or terms with documents and rate they based on a relevancy scale. The high ratings for relevancy will flag specific documents for review by your legal team while the low relevancy ones can be reviewed by the service with their trained staff.
The result is a very effective and efficient way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of documents. The process not only frees up your legal team to focus on more important issues but also greatly reduces the time and cost to complete the reviews manually. With increased accuracy and decreased human errors and omissions, the outsourcing process is a very smart option for any type of large scale doc review process.