Five Tips to Avoid Costly Mistakes in Electronic Document Review – Part 3

This is part-three of my blog series, Five Tips to Avoid Costly Mistakes in Document Review. Part One gave an introduction and explained the first tip, the Time factor, talking about the importance of avoiding time pressures and resultant hurried activities. Part Two explained the second tip, Ethics, and how scrupulous integrity and compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct will help you to avoid a host of serious mistakes, including career-ending ones. This third and final blog explains tip Three on Focused Concentration, which was mentioned in passing in the Part One video on Time, and tips four and five, on Worms and Check Again.

The Focus tip is based on my own experiences in cultivating the ability to concentrate on legal work, or anything else. It is contra to the popular, but erroneous notion, a myth really, that you can multi-task and still do each task efficiently. Our brain does not work that way. See Eg. Crenshaw, The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done; and the work of neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, who has found the only exception is adding certain background music. All document reviewers who wear head-sets, myself included, know this exception very well.

For more on quality control and improved lifestyle by focused attention and other types of meditation, see my earlier video blog, Document Review and Predictive Coding: Video Talks – Part Six, especially the 600 word introduction to that video that includes information on the regular meditation practices of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, among others. Also see A Word About Zen Meditation. This practice helped Steve Jobs, and helps Justice Breyer and countless others. It could help you too. It will, at the very least, allow for more focused attention to what you are doing, including document review, and thus greatly reduce mistakes.

The Worms tip is a simple technical one, unique to e-discovery, where Worm is an acronym that means write once, read many times. I prefer to make productions on write-only or recordable only CDs, aka, CD-R, or DVD-R, and not by file transfers. I do not want to use a CD-RW, or DVD-RW meaning one that is rewritable.

The fifth tip of Check Again, has to do with the importance of redundancy in quality control, subject only to proportionality considerations, including the tip to spot check your final production CD. I discuss briefly the tendency of lawyers to be trapped by paralysis by analysis, and why we are sometimes considered deal killers by business people because we focus so much on risk avoidance and over-think things. There has to be a proportional limit on the number and cost of double-checks in document review. I also mention in the fifth tip my Accept of Zero Error and ei-Recall checks, which are quality assurance efforts that we make in larger document review projects.

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Tip #3 – Focused Concentration

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Tip #4 – Use WORMS to Produce

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Tip #5 – Check Again

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