While news about COVID-19 and remote work abounds, legal practitioners have yet to analyze how COVID-19 has altered the eDiscovery process. For businesses and organizations of all kinds, remote work has become the new standard. However, for professionals unfamiliar with business standards, this new working paradigm poses many obstacles, particularly in maintaining security while working remotely. For example, many businesses are concerned that their employees will mishandle or retain data unlawfully while working outside the office.
However, improperly maintained and misused data can readily obstruct eDiscovery data collection and legal holds. As a result, organizations must foresee eDiscovery issues and take steps to address them, such as developing and adopting policies around remote work to facilitate the resolution of eDiscovery disputes. Let’s read what these precautions can be.
1. Streamline Communication
Strong and effective communication is often the key to a team’s success. Working remotely in any capacity necessitates effective communication between team members. The document review process can be lonely, and it’s challenging to discuss around the corner with your coworker at an extraordinary period of uncertainty.
As a result, leveraging collaborative platforms like Microsoft Teams to facilitate virtual communication is one strategy to develop sound and successful communication. Microsoft Teams includes features such as multi-user document collaboration, chat, file storage, virtual conference rooms, and integrated office apps. These apps are a great way of ensuring a well-informed communication within the company’s shared places.
2. Take Advantage of the Right Technology
Any document review process can benefit significantly from technology in terms of cost, efficiency, uniformity, and accuracy. Review accelerators that organize and categorize different data types for practical analysis to advanced analytics tools that quickly find essential information and drastically reduce review data are among the technologies and solutions available to streamline the review process.
During the review process, a document review service provider takes a consultative, proactive, and iterative approach, utilizing these helpful tech tools to conduct successful document reviews and give accurate results while also ensuring that sensitive data is protected.
3. Adopt Automation
Technology can assist in implementing automation for review to a great extent. Document reviewers can now simply minimize manual reviewing tasks by using automated workflow capabilities that allow reviewers to define and distribute bundles of documents to designated reviewer groups. During the process, records can be marked as incomplete, indicating that more action is required.
Documents that fit the check-in requirements automatically move to the next available step in the review stream. However, if the reviewer attempts to specify contradictory categorizations, the document will fail to check-in. The reviewer is then notified to revise the categorization judgment. Automation saves time, boosts productivity, efficiency, and accuracy, and frees up administrators’ time to focus on more critical activities.
4. Unparalleled Success Regardless of Location
Working from home allows you to take advantage of your work location as a team assembles from across countries and places with no restrictions. In addition, the units are now more diverse and tailored to the needs of the current review.
For example, if a foreign language is required, reviewers who are skilled in that language may be quickly enlisted. The ability to recruit reviewers worldwide makes it easier to bring someone with particular expertise on board if required.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity for data sharing and rigorous evaluation and technological frameworks that include active participation as the area of remote document review evolves. In addition, it’s critical to earn public trust by implementing excellent communication strategies across all digital media and displaying a commitment to proportional privacy. With these setbacks taken care of, remote document review is a highly considered virtual solution because of its numerous unfair advantages that will benefit both the short and long run.
