Digital White Papers

73 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Managing Incoming Document Productions Strategically As you look at the load files and some sample images or native files, notice the format in which the files were produced. Try some of the same quality control procedures you use when you send out your own productions: does the Bates range of the production match what is in the transmial? Is it the next in sequence to prior productions? Does the number of text files match the number of records in the load file? Load the .dat file into Excel and filter by various columns. Does the data in the fields match what you expect to find, and does it match the production specification? Will opposing's fields map into your existing database or will you need to add new fields? Is every document searchable? Are there documents with no optical character recognition (OCR)? Know your hosting platform and any service provider limitations. Many companies and platforms have emphasized review of native documents for production and may not know how to handle a messy set of Bates-numbered TIFF images. We have seen vendors flummoxed by fields named sortdate and SORTDATE; multiple OCR text fields; and suffix pages named A, B, C instead of .001, .002, .003. If you can normalize what you send to your hosting provider ahead of time you will save your client time and money. Weigh how easily the producing party will be able to fix issues before you incur charges: missing aachments may take weeks, while a missing sentdate field should be available sooner. Begin collecting metrics on the production: how many emails? How many native files? Are documents redacted? Is there a way to identify those? Are documents designated with confidentiality status per your protective order and is that information in a field? If your client has access to your review database, are you able to segregate any attorneys' eyes only or outside counsel's eyes only documents from their view? Sometimes we have had to re- OCR a production just to pick up confidentiality language on a production with multiple confidentiality layers. Are there gaps in Bates numbers? It is helpful to have a form template where you fill in fields for producing party, document types, custodians, issues with the production, when it will be available for review, etc. This step is especially important if you are managing a project for multiple organizations. And be sure to obtain and check any import summary and error log your service provider generates. Depending on your review platform and pricing structure, decide if you will use technology-assisted review and analytics on your incoming productions. Clustering by content, email threading, and near de-duplication are standard methods for reviewing incoming productions quickly. At my firm we have flat fee pricing on our analytics so we automatically update our analytics indexes aer loading each production. It is a great way to get our end users familiar with analytics tools. Consider whether to enhance a received production. If you receive a few thousand pages of PDFs, you may need to unitize into smaller sets. Sometimes you will benefit from redoing bad OCR or extracting more useful metadata from produced native files. In that case you will need to decide whether to use produced metadata or your own. Adding a master or sort date is a common enhancement organizations make on received productions as a way to have one date field for searching and sorting. If you want to deduplicate an incoming native production against one your organization processed, you could generate new hash values on all produced files. Some Depending on your review platform and pricing structure, decide if you will use technology- assisted review and analytics on your incoming productions. Clustering by content, email threading, and near de-duplication are standard methods for reviewing incoming productions quickly.

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