Extract from Todd Heffner’s article “Deja Vu in Discovery: Didn’t I Just Review That?”
“I thought I just reviewed that document!” is something every document reviewer since the dawn of time has thought. Duplicate documents, and documents that seem like duplicates but aren’t, can slow down document review, increase costs and lead to inconsistent document coding—which can be extremely problematic when occurring during a privilege review. This article explores why document reviewers who claim to see duplicates are right and wrong at the same time by explaining how deduplication works and the inherent shortcomings with that process. This article also offers a solution: two technologies—near-dupe detection and email threading—which can greatly reduce the number of “duplicate” documents that must be reviewed.
