With an increasing number of different types of documents being created in today's corporate environment, one review platform does not work for all cases.  Each review platform has unique characteristics and ways of reviewing the imported data.  There are three basic types of review a platform can use to view and analyze documents.  Below is a brief description of these types of review categories. 

Native:

Native review often refers to the format of the documents being reviewed.  In order to keep costs down, the litigation support industry has moved from a TIFF based review environment to one that allows for documents to be reviewed with their original, or native, application.  Today, documents can be reviewed not only in their native application, but in a native document viewer, which renders the document into a viewing application.  Two main benefits of this are that the users don’t have to rely on the local machine to launch every application type, and the rendering of the native application occurs on the server where the data is hosted, greatly increasing review efficiency.   New technology also allows documents to be redacted in their native format through these rendering applications.  UHY Advisors maintains a review platform that can provide all of the functionality listed above.

Linear:

Linear review refers to a style of review that emphasizes the importance of reviewing all documents for two things, relevancy and privilege.  This review style uses various methods for arriving at the same end, the ability to defensibly prove that all documents pertinent to the discovery request were identified, and that any privilege documents were withheld.  A common linear review approach could be described in the following example:

A legal team receives a discovery request regarding ESI.  After the ESI is collected, it is filtered based on many criteria, the first of which is the date range within the request.  Next the data set is filtered based on key terms, then processed for loading into a review platform.  Within the review platform attorneys look at every document to determine whether or not the document is responsive, or possibly privileged. 

Conceptual/Analytic:

When ESI volume reaches a critical mass, often the need exists to identify large numbers of records as either responsive or non-responsive, and rather quickly.  Most analytic tools and clustering tools utilize mathematic equations that at their core identify statistical equivalence.  By grouping documents together through these complex formulas users can quickly see how closely related certain documents are, thereby assigning a relevancy designation to a broad number of documents with a few clicks.  While the analytic and clustering tools don’t remove the need for humans to review documents, they do offer an efficient way to classify documents and find related documents quickly.