Is Your Review Team Up to Par?

At the end of the day, regardless of the e-discovery providers you select, you are only as good as your review team. When choosing an on-shore or off-shore provider, you need to ensure they have stellar hiring and training practices. Here are some guidelines:

Hiring

Building a good review team starts with the hiring process. The best review teams consist of well-educated attorneys. Hire individuals educated in a legal system closely aligned to your own. This means if you are in the UK, then perhaps India, Australia or New Zealand attorneys would be a good fit; and, if you are in the U.S., the Philippines is your best bet. As I noted in my August 28 blog post, in the recent ABA Ethics Committee opinion, the Committee opined that “[w]hen outsourcing to foreign lawyers you need to assess whether their legal education is comparable to that of lawyers in the U.S.” ABA Formal Opinion 08-451, at 3. “In some nations, people can call themselves ‘lawyers’ with only a minimal level of training. Also, the professional regulatory system should be evaluated to determine whether members of the nation’s legal profession have been inculcated with core ethical principles similar to those in the United States, and whether the nation’s disciplinary enforcement system is effective in policing its lawyers.” Id. at 3-4.

In order to ensure that you are hiring the best, you must do your homework - conduct background checks, confirm undergraduate and law school education, confirm references and administer competency tests. Once you are confident you’ve made the right selection, it’s time to think about training. You should be asking your outsourcing service provider about the following important components of an effective training protocol for review teams:

What kind of general training is conducted for the review teams?

Legal Training

• Is an overview of the discovery procedure (including document production formalities followed in the applicable jurisdiction) provided?
• If jurisdiction is within the U.S., does the team receive a refresher on the attorney-client privilege and work product concepts?

IT Training

• Are there in-depth platform and e-discovery technology platform training sessions for all team members?

Tests

• Are tests administered on the team’s understanding of legal issues and facts involved in the litigation?
• Are tests administered on the team’s understanding of the review protocol?

On-the-Job Training

• Do the quality control personnel provide regular daily feedback to first level reviewers to increase efficiency and accuracy?
• Does senior management maintain a quality check on workflow by providing continuous feedback to highlight errors and areas of improvement?

Are there any project-specific training protocols?

Training Materials

• Do your team members have a comprehensive review binder containing a summary of the matter or litigation, pleadings, notice to produce/document requests, cast of characters, privilege list?
• Do they provide the team with e-discovery technology user guides or other training documents?

Facts of the Case

• Do they provide project specific training sessions that start with introducing the reviewers to the facts of the specific litigation?
• Do they review relevant pleadings and case documents, ensuring each reviewer is familiar with the complaint, the requests for production, attorney lists and a list of FAQs?

Law Related to the Case

• Do they review and refresh concepts of responsiveness, attorney-client privilege and work product protection as well as a discussion of confidential and proprietary information related to the case?
• Do they provide training on all substantive issues pertinent to the review?

Process

• Do they provide refresher training on the e-discovery review platform?
• Do they provide online training modules designed that mimic live review situations?
• Do they provide continuous testing of individual reviewer’s work product (e.g. two reviewers are given the same documents to review and the work product is compared for accuracy)?
• Do they administer periodic testing on the FAQs, attorney lists, and the requests for production?

If you are outsourcing or contemplating doing so, you owe it to yourself, your company and your client to investigate your service provider’s hiring and training practices. This is the only way to ensure you have a quality team staffing your projects. If any readers have other suggestions about effective training programs they’ve observed, we’d be happy to hear about them. We’ll include a “training best practices” summary in a future post.