Best Practices in Second Request Document Review: How to Execute An E-discovery-Based Plan

Establishing a clear strategy for your response from the outset can help limit the scope of the overall second request.

As you start planning your second-request strategy, the most important thing is to engage all key stakeholders at the earliest possible moment. This will provide you with the facts you need to build the four cornerstones of your response:

1. Your negotiation strategy to limit scope of review
2. How your technology can help streamline the review
3. Where most (if not all) of the potential data is located, using the most requested items as your starting point and
4. An understanding of your unstructured data so you can work out how to review it or, if necessary, produce reports from these systems.

This last cornerstone is especially critical. Unstructured data (such as financial data and reports from CRM, HRIS, and ERP systems whose data doesn't exist in a specific database or location) needs careful handling in e-discovery. For example, reports or exports from those systems don't lend themselves to traditional or AI review techniques and often need to be authenticated through a third party or an expert. You'll therefore need to establish a process that specifies how you plan to review those documents, which techniques you're going to use, how you'll validate and certify the results, and ultimately what the form of production will be for these sets of data.