A recent article entitled, “Ethics and E-discovery Review” discusses how unethical it is for law firms to charge their clients for reviewing duplicates (”dupes”) of the same document multiple times. This is an interesting article that provides an e-discovery overview from the General Counsel’s perspective. It’s published in ACC Docket, The Journal of the Associated Corporate Counsel.
From a reviewer’s perspective, it is clear that many of the reviews back in the glory days of 2006 & 2007 were rife with non de-duped documents or as the article calls them, “document consolidation” issues. These days, however, the reviews are shorter and the technology more robust. The searches are more powerful, the number of duplicates greatly reduced. This is of course the general trend, but there are exceptions.
The article pushes de-duping a step further by stating it is unethical for attorneys to not explore “document consolidation” as failing to do so results in unnecessary work and thus overbilling.
It would seem to be that this discussion is probably too technical for many of the older generation partners. Many migrated to the field of law because they lacked technical or math skills. I would imagine that this is also beyond the purview of the average in house counsel. The average contract attorney document reviewer, knows all to well about “document consolidation”. We have seen many instances of the same documents being recycled throughout the review. While it sounds easy to “consolidate” or de-dupe documents there are often technical impediments to doing so completely. In other instances, the remedy is more expensive than the malady. So, while reducing duplicates is a common theme in document reviews, each given review will have differing levels of success depending upon its own unique circumstances. That’s what makes e-discovery interesting, that each case presents its own challenges. From the Inside Counsel’s perspective, interesting can get expensive rather quickly and they are more interested in the bottom line. It’s just not clear if the goals of the article are attainable in the majority of cases.
