By David Tanenholz, Managing Partner
In Part 47 of our series “Essential Tools for Efficient, Economical, and Defensible Documents Reviews”, we present the Crown Jewel of all Document Review Support Materials: The Tracking Chart.
While the advantages of a well-maintained tracking chart literally number in the hundreds, today we examine just three of the most important benefits:
Improving Invoices
Document review has always been the most expensive and scrutinized part of most litigation budgets. Respectful and respectable firms put as much detail and explanation as possible into their invoices to give their clients a full accounting of the expenses related to the collection and production of data.
Diligent discovery counsel can work with their e-Discovery vendors to use descriptive naming conventions for documents that are loaded to their review platform. But, there are logistical limits to how much information can be put into a load volume name. Using our sample tracking chart above, you can see how easily one can improve their billing description, from say:
“Process and load CTRL-SPP-003”
(which likely means absolutely nothing to your client)
to
“Process and load data from laptop and desktop computers from H. Simpson, L. Leonard, and C. Carlson.”
(which likely explains where this charge fits with respect to the overall collection plan)
Counting Documents and Pages
Clients and co-counsel are always asking for updated document and page counts.
This can be for a variety of reasons, but the most common is that they are usually trying to defend the reasonableness of their productions to date by showing the volume and/or expense of items that have been produced. While document and page counts can usually be tabulated in some form by the hosting platform software, the tracking chart can help speed up the calculations, especially if there are numerous different parties or document Bates prefix schemes.
In a complex and lengthy litigation, there can be literally hundreds of productions from different opposing parties, co-parties, and non-parties. It might be very complicated to run database searches that can parse out for specific document and page count requests at a moment’s notice.
In contrast, the tracking chart very easily allows you to sort and sum instantly by Party Name, Party Type, Date, or Bates Range. Nothing makes co-counsel happier that a super-fast response that lets them fill in a cite to a brief or letter they are trying to get out the door.
Researching Past Collections and Productions
Document collections and productions can be a wild, wild, ride.
Files are received that turn out to be corrupted and need to be re-collected. Opposing counsel can accidentally skip a production volume number or a Bates range series. Items are clawed back and substituted. Metadata is overlaid. Keyword search terms evolve, and date range filters are modified. Productions need to be resent. Parties drop out of litigation. Collections are supplemented. Special instructions are given. Exceptions are made. Etc. Etc. Etc.
The “Notes” field helps you keep track of all of these items which are really clear and obvious while they are occurring, but that will be a complete mystery when they reappear with no context six months later. Generally, this is a good place to note the following:
- How productions we transmitted and by whom;
- Which load volumes and custodians were included in each production;
- How many log lines are included for each privilege log;
- Copy and paste the specific language from emails and letters that give any type of special instructions or unorthodox procedures.
Take it from an e-Discovery old-timer, these notes can be absolute time savers, if not lifesavers.
Thank you for Reading this Important Blog Post.
Please stay tuned for Next Week’s Edition: “Part 48: “Database Hosting Fees: No, We Don’t Want Our Clients to Hate Us”
