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The Offline Review

By Jerry Bui

Every so often, there's an unavoidable need to export documents out of your review platform for "offline review". This can mean something as simple as printing documents out for an attorney to provide handwritten comments; or it can mean something more complicated like exporting documents to an offline format because your system's native viewer can't render documents containing illegible text, password protection, or foreign language content.

Make sure this is a necessity. Tracking these documents later can create a huge reconciliation headache.

Ensure that everything has been tried within the system to fix your problematic docs. If TIFF-on-demand, or installing language packs, or password recovery measures don't fix your documents, then tread carefully with "offline review". Remember these challenges:

How do you summarize the review markings and production status of these offline documents in your standard status reports?

How do you maintain an audit trail for the way these documents change over time during the course of the offline review?

If you or someone on your team backfills markings, annotations, and redactions into your online system on the reviewers' behalf, know that YOU will be recorded as the reviewer for that subset of documents. How does this affect the accuracy of your reviewer progress reports?

You'll discover that your pretty online reports are riddled with asterisks and footnotes, referencing ugly, confusing spreadsheets that contain specific stats for your "offline review". Also, unless you are extremely meticulous with offline tracking, your ability to confidently explain the status of your review quickly diminishes once you head down the path of "offline review".

Full post as published by E-Discovery In the Trenches on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).