How DISCO’s Search Terms Simplify QC

It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday night, you have 10,000 documents coded, and a rolling production due to opposing counsel by midnight — how are you going to get documents ready to go? How can you isolate the documents you can clearly produce — responsive, non-privileged families — so you can make your deadline? 

This isn’t an uncommon fact pattern. Yet despite how often this occurs, most discovery platforms do not have a simple and easy means to identify families that are consistently or inconsistently coded to make the final stretch of preparing your production straightforward.

The old way, and the better way

So what’s a poor associate to do? If an attorney was relying on a legacy platform, they would have to:

1. Create a saved search for all documents tagged responsive, plus their family members, and add it to a folder. 
2. Create another saved search for all documents tagged with anything other than responsive, plus their family members, and add it to another folder.  
3. Create yet another search to identify families of documents that are in both search 1 and search 2 above. 

Depending on the size of the database, running these searches could take hours. More realistically, the associate would have called their service provider to perform this work — creating hours of delay and incurring hundreds or thousands of dollars in professional services fees. 

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So what would happen if this associate had used DISCO? 

With DISCO, here are the steps the attorney would need to take:

1. Run a single search to identify the full responsive, non-privileged documents ready and available to go out the door.
   

That’s it, you’re done. You may even be off work in time to enjoy your Friday night.

DISCO has simple, elegant search syntax that pulls up consistently coded families in one step: familyConsistentTag(_). Searching for familyConsistentTag(Responsive) pulls up all families that have been consistently coded as responsive across their family members. Voila. This rolling production set is ready to go.  

But wait, there’s more!

But what about when the associate has to decide what to do about the remaining, inconsistently coded families? How can the attorney easily separate the families that have some documents tagged as “privileged” versus the families that only have some documents tagged as “non-responsive” — without having to resort to a document-by-document manual review? And, more importantly, how do they ensure that all of the documents tagged as non-responsive get reviewed for privilege and confidentiality?

DISCO takes care of that too. 

By searching for familyInconsistentTag(Responsive or “Responsive due to Family”) & tag(Non-responsive), our associate can pull up the individual documents that have been tagged as non-responsive, but have responsive family members. If they turn on family search, they can pull up those entire families to review with context. 

Performing rapid, efficient quality control in anticipation of productions becomes possible when you use DISCO’s family inconsistency and consistency searches. With them, you can easily identify the universe of documents you care about and increase your confidence that you’re producing the right materials.

To learn about DISCO’s holistic and real-time review QC capabilities, check out this one page explainer.