Document Review in the Pandemic

Document review has long been associated with large rooms filled with teams of people reviewing documents at a furious pace.  Unfortunately, this model requiring everyone to be in the same physical location has significant downsides (especially today).  At Harbor, we chose a different route for our review teams from the beginning, and this new remote model has proven itself again and again in large-scale litigation.  Particularly during the current pandemic.

The best argument for the team being in the same physical location is collaboration.

When we set out to create a remote review team, this kind of collaboration was key to us.  Questions and new information need to be provided to the team quickly, and ideally a sense of team should be promoted within the group.  We wanted to provide our client law firm teams with access to our review teams in real time.  One of our core design elements was to include tools that allowed for this type of collaboration despite being remote from one another.

Security was another core concern.

The idea that having a team in one physical location makes it easier to control client information was another common basis for a single physical location.  It was key to us that, despite our licensed attorneys having an ethical obligation to the client, we implemented technological hurdles to client information being released.  To that end our workstations are designed to give our team access to all the same tools, links, and other information, but limit their ability to export that information to local devices (i.e. outside our system).

In addition to the fact that we built a system that works better than local systems, we do more to ensure our talent pool is better as well.

We test our teams to ensure their dedication to the goals of the specific review.  This testing allows us to ensure not only the speed of each reviewer but also their ability to identify the nuances of a given review.

In the end, because we are able to pull talent from any location, we can build the best teams for a given task.  We’ve spent years building the best technological resources to ensure security, but in some ways more importantly, we’ve ensured a team-building environment where information moves seamlessly between clients and our review teams.  Frequently, our review team members are offered higher rates for onsite reviews, but turn them down because our model is better.  Try the Harbor solution and see for yourself.