Example Projects

Litigation departments are increasingly finding their solution to large scale document review unsatisfactory. It involves delaying existing work, aggravating other departments and the prohibitive cost is damaging relationships with clients and becoming an obstacle to conducting litigation. It is an expensive and untidy situation.

Current solutions to the problem involve the outsourcing of the work abroad (jurisdictions undertaking this work include South Africa and India) or using existing technologies to automatically review documentation. Neither of these solutions is perceived as satisfactory. Outsourcing the work abroad is seen to involve too great a risk in terms of controlling the staff undertaking the work and the quality of work received back is often found to be below the standard expected; many clients are also unwilling to risk the transfer of their data outside the EEA. Using intelligent searching technologies to automatically create taxonomies is simply too great a leap of faith for litigators to use to hand over large quantities of documentation without them being read by document review staff as well as being warned against in the proposed new practice direction to CPR 31.

i‐Lit Paralegals provides a solution to the problem by supplying staff to law firms and companies for the specific purpose of document review within client premises. Our unit based charging model allows law firms and their clients to transform the document review process from an elastic cost element of the litigation process to a fixed cost whilst at the same time transferring risk from their firm to i‐Lit Paralegals (i‐Lit Paralegals pay our staff by the hour so risks associated with inconsistent review quality and slow review rates become the preserve of i‐Lit Paralegals). Of course i‐Lit Paralegals is extremely concerned to ensure the highest quality work product and achieves this by close project management and by building in a full quality control procedure which ensures that every document reviewed is reviewed twice before being marked as completed.

i‐Lit Paralegals recommends that law firms complete a large element of the review process in‐house. The most important custodians should be reviewed by internal staff working on the case. This ensures that the most likely source of important documentation is reviewed internally and that the firm retains revenue from the review process.

A typical case may produce 100,000 documents for review, approximately 35% of these documents are reviewed by law firm staff with the remainder being reviewed, at the law firms premises, by a team of paralegals who are employed by i-Lit Paralegals. The element of the review completed by i-Lit Paralegals is completed at a fixed cost and under the complete control of the law firm.

The review is completed to an extremely high quality as quickly as the firm would like (we simply supply more paralegals (at no extra cost) for a faster review) at an extremely competitive price, we're normally less than half the price of a full internal review.