What is Document Review?
We often speak to barristers and solicitors about document review. One thing we know is that, for many legal professionals, reviewing hundreds or even thousands of documents is one of the most time-consuming and repetitive parts of a case. It can be a tedious task, but it's an essential one.
Fortunately, there are specialists who genuinely enjoy the process. Document reviewers are trained to work through large volumes of material methodically, identifying the evidence that matters and helping legal teams focus their time where it adds the most value.
At its core, Document Review is the process of determining which documents are relevant to a case. For example, out of a population of 1,000 documents, a review team may identify 300 that are relevant to the issues in dispute. The goal is to separate the documents that could support, challenge or otherwise influence a case from those that have little or no evidential value.
Document Review is typically carried out in two stages, plus an appropriate amount of Quality Control:
First Level Review
The First Level Review focuses on relevance and categorisation.
Reviewers assess each document to determine whether it is relevant to the case, identify key issues, legal privilege, and apply the appropriate tags to classify documents into categories specific to the case.
This stage creates a structured review set and significantly reduces the volume of material requiring further analysis.
Second-Level Review
Documents identified as relevant during the First Level Review are then assessed in greater detail.
Senior reviewers, lawyers or counsel may examine key evidence, identify privileged material, assess case themes, and prepare documents for disclosure, witness statements or trial preparation.
By applying a structured review process, legal teams can efficiently identify the documents that matter most, improve consistency, and reduce the time spent searching for critical evidence.
Quality Control
It is an extremely important task that is carried out throughout the whole project but especially during the First Level Review.
Random sampling and targeted searches are performed to identify documents that may need to be reassessed to address inconsistencies.
By applying a structured, multi-level review process, legal teams can efficiently identify the documents that matter most while maintaining consistency, accuracy, and defensibility throughout the review exercise.
At Legastat, we work on projects ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousand documents employing experienced, trusted document reviewers and using the review software capabilities to streamline the process and guarantee to our clients efficiency and accuracy.
In the days when AI is the most talked topic in the eDiscovery world, we still appreciate and love working with trusted document reviewers.
A review team surely cannot beat the AI in terms of numbers but often the team’s human intelligence identifies connections and explore paths that the machine is not always able to find so effectively.
Commitment to the project, critical thinking and shared feedback are traits that we are grateful to find in our review teams, and they allow us to deliver successful projects for our clients.
The human touch given by a humorous message in the chat or a nice emoji that show personal engagement are then the “icing on the cake”, and we love that!
Get in touch if you want to know more about how Legastat deploys AI and trusted document reviewers to exceed clients’ expectations.
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