Document Review in Today’s Pandemic

Legal departments rushed to transition their teams to work from home in order to adhere with the highest precautions.

COVID-19 has changed the way we work. People are working from home, students are attending classes online, legal departments and law firms have transitioned much of their work to occur remotely.

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Remote Document Review

While the rest of the world made a massive pivot to working remotely in response to COVID-19, remote collection has been a staple in eDiscovery’s wheelhouse for years.
(https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/covid-19-and-e-discovery-how-things-are-2867441/) On the other hand, prior to COVID-19, document review had long been administered on-site with very few document review cases that allowed contract attorneys to work remotely.

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Remote document review quickly became the only way to keep employees safe. Whether these changes are temporary or here to stay remains to be seen. In any case, the operational benefits in terms of reduced cost and increased efficiencies are not going unnoticed.
(https://documentmedia.com/article-3049-A-Point-of-Inflection-Remote-eDiscovery.html)

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Security protocols to keep information safe

From a client perspective, is remote document review secure? Clients will almost inevitably have questions and concerns about safeguarding their private and confidential data during a remote document review. Truthfully, a remote document review comes with security challenges, simply because we cannot know with 100% certainty where the review is performed, who may have access to view an attorney’s computer screen, or who may have access to review protocols and case memos. However, a remote document review can be performed securely if certain precautions are taken. Effective precautions for consideration include:

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• Document reviews should not be performed in a public location.
• Document reviewers should be aware of their surroundings.
• Document reviewers should lock their computers when not in use.
• Any review should be performed on a computer that is only used by the reviewer, and if that is not possible, the reviewer should clear their internet browser history and secure any files or other confidential client information before the computer or computer area is used by anyone else.
• Document reviewers are prohibited from downloading materials onto their personal computers or sending/receiving materials using personal email addresses.

(https://www.ktlitsmart.com/blog/life-after-covid-19-e-discovery-considerations-attorneys-and-clients)

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Covid-19の影響はEディスカバリ業界にも及び、テレワーク型のリモートレビューに移行しつつあります。
情報セキュリティ管理するため、リモートレビュー時において下記のような対策が取られております。

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• 公共スペースからレビューを行わない。公共スペースでない場合も注意に十分気を払う。
• レビュー用PCから離れる際はロックをかける。
• レビューには必ず専用のPCを使い、レビュー担当者以外の者には使用させない。それができない場合は、レビュー後に必ずインターネットの履歴や機密情報を全消去する。
• レビュー担当者の個人PC、Eメールへの情報持ち出しを禁止する。

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