By organizing documents into review stages, you can control user access to each stage, customize the review decisions, and monitor the progress of each stage. 

Contents:

• Ingesting, creating tags, and organizing documents
• Creating stages
• Selecting a document source
• Organizing documents
• Ranking documents
• Creating a decision pane
• Adding and assigning reviewers
• Limiting group access
• Monitoring and reassigning batches
• Checking out batches
• Removing batches and removing unreviewed documents from batches
• Tracking progress
• Quality control
• Using documents

Creating stages

When your documents are ready for review, create your review stages.

To create a review stage:

1. In the DISCO main menu, click Manage Review Stages.
   
2. On the Review Stages page, click Create New.
   
3. In the New review stage box, enter a name for the new review stage and then click Create.
   

Common review stages include:

• Issue Review – All or some documents that need to be reviewed for issues. If you receive documents as a rolling production, where data comes to you in stages rather than in one piece, set up your stage groupings by ingest session and group by Bates number.
• Escalation Review – Funnel documents from the issue review into an escalated review stage for attorneys with more familiarity with the facts and issues of the case.

Selecting a document source

You can populate the stage with search results as sources. You may have up to 20 discrete sources per stage each containing a distinct search string. For example, you can use a search string that limits the documents in a stage by a date range, to a particular set of custodians, or to a set of search terms. To include all documents, create a source by typing * in the search field.

To make sure all family members are included in a batch, when setting up the stage, select Include family members of source documents. If you would like to include conversations and group them in your batch, select Include emails in the same conversation. To limit conversations, select Limit conversations to inclusive emails and all attachments and their parents.

Navigate to the location of the new source or locate the source by searching:

• An ad hoc search (with the help of traditional search builder and search examples)
• A search from your search history
• Any saved search

Here you can also rename a source.

Organizing documents

There are three organization options for documents:

• Group by – You may group by Custodian, Document type, Ingest Session, Stage Source, or No groups. You can restrict access level permission control for groups.
• Order by – If you are using groups, order adjusts the sort order within each group.
  
  If you choose to NOT keep families or conversations together in your batch, you may select one of the Order by options: Tag Prediction, BatesNumber, Date, Family Date, or Path.
  
  If you chose to keep conversations together, the default sort order is Conversation Date.
  
  Note: When keeping conversations together, documents not part of a conversation will be ordered by their family date, if in a family, or by their document date if not.
• Batches contain – Select the maximum batch size. Batches represent the maximum number of documents that may be checked out in a set of documents. Users can check out multiple batches, but if the number of documents remaining in a group is less than the maximum batch size, the batch will only contain the available number of documents. Five hundred documents is a common batch size. Batches are checked out by reviewers but may be re-assigned to a different reviewer by an administrator.

Ranking documents

Ranking places the visible instance of deduplicated documents in the highest ranked group. Ranking is important for getting the most context out of your documents you are reviewing. For example, if you group your documents by Custodian (as displayed in the image above), you will want the most important Custodian listed at the top. This way, if you have documents across multiple custodians, your documents will get grouped into review stages so that you get the most context around those documents. 

You can rank your groups by dragging and dropping the rows.

When you have finished, click Save and next.

Creating a decision pane

Review decisions are the decisions that you want reviewers to consider when reviewing the documents within a stage. The reviewer uses the decision pane to notate the decision information for each document they review. There are two ways to construct your decision pane.

• Copy review decisions
• Build review design pane

Copy review decisions

1. On the Review Decisions settings for a stage, click Copy review decisions from another stage.
2. Select the stage you want to copy the review decisions from. You can hover over a stage in the dropdown list to see a preview of review decisions.
3. Click Confirm to copy the review decisions.
4. The page now shows the same review decisions settings as the selected stage.

Build review design pane

1. Construct your decision pane by clicking the buttons under Review Components. Once you click on a component, it will appear in the decision pane editor on the right.  You can include a label or instructions in the text box.
2. Select the tags you’d like the reviewer to choose from and those tags will be populated in the editor as radio buttons. NOTE:  As you build a decision pane, the decision pane editor displays exactly what the reviewer will see as they review the stage’s documents.
3. When you are done building your decision pane, click Save.

Adding and assigning reviewers

Once you have set up your stages and created the decision pane, you can create users and assign them to each stage. 

To assign reviewers:

1. In the DISCO main menu, click Review Team.
   
2. On the Review Team page, click in the Assign or create a user... text box and select a user from the list or click New user to create a new user. Then, choose a role for the user in the Select a role dropdown (custom roles are available as well):
   • Admin: The admin role may complete all actions in DISCO.
   • Reviewer: The reviewer may complete searches, complete batch actions such as mass tag and exhibit sets, and produce documents from DISCO as well as review documents inside and outside of Review Stages. Reviewers, however, do not have access to setup stages or to manage stages.
   • Restricted Reviewer: The restricted reviewer does not have access to the usual DISCO features of search, batch actions, and productions. They only have access to the stages for which they have been assigned. In the document viewer, restricted reviewers will have access to view related documents (such as families, conversations, and similar documents). However, if a related document is not in one of their assigned batches, the restricted reviewer will not be able to perform any action on the document; they will only be able to view these related documents for purposes of context in their review.
     
     When you add a restricted reviewer to a stage, they will receive a welcome email instructing them how to log in to the database and start reviewing, and they can then check out batches and review documents.

To add reviewers:

1. In the Manage Review Stage screen, select the Reviewers tab if it is not currently selected.
2. Click the Add Reviewer button to display a list of matter users.
3. Check the box to the left of the user's name to add them to the Review stage.
4. Click Save.

When you are done, all reviewers' names will appear in the Reviewer tab.

Limiting group access

Groups allow you to limit the access to certain batches based on the stage settings.

To set an additional level of access:

1. In the Manage Review Stage screen, click Open in a Review Stage card. Select the Groups tab.
2. Hover over the ellipsis menu icon to display the Change access button.
3. Click on the Change access button and DISCO will provide you with a list of reviewer names to choose from. You can give access to either All Reviewers or Select reviewers.

   

NOTE: If you click Select reviewers, use the check boxes to choose the reviewers' names.

4. Click Save.

Once you are done, the user names of the reviewers you selected will appear in the Accessible to section of that Stage source under the Groups tab.

 

Monitoring and reassigning batches

Under the Batches tab, you can see all the batches that have been checked out and monitor their progress. At times, you may need to reassign batches of documents to other reviewers.

To monitor the progress of a batch:

1. In the Manage Review Stage screen, click Open in a Review Stage card. Select the Batches tab.
2. View the progress bar to monitor the progress of each batch.

To reassign a batch:

1. In the Manage Review Stage screen, select the Batches tab.
2. Hover over the ellipsis menu icon to display the Give to button.
3. Select the batch you want to reassign. DISCO will only allow you to choose from those reviewers who are allowed access.

Once you have reassigned the batch, the new reviewer's name will appear in the batch Status column.

Checking out batches

A batch is a collection of the next available documents or documents from a group (the default is Next available).

To check out a batch:

1. In the DISCO main menu, click Check Out Batches, and then click the stage name.
   
2. On the My Batches page, next to Grab next batch from, either leave the default Next available or select a custodian from the dropdown, and then click Check out.
   
3. On the batch review screen, click a document to open it. The decision pane you created earlier will be on the left side of the document viewer.
   
4. When you have finished reviewing the document, click Mark Reviewed & Next. The next document in the batch will open.
   
   When a document has been reviewed, a green check mark will display in the REVIEWED column on the batch review screen. Also, a progress bar shows how many documents have successfully been reviewed.
   
5. When the batch has been reviewed, click Check-in.

*IMPORTANT NOTE: When you check out a batch, DISCO uses just-in-time batching, which means that all of the documents in a stage are not put into batches until the reviewer requests them. That way, any change in strategy in your review does not revolve around lots of deconstruction of batches that have not yet been reviewed.

*IMPORTANT NOTE: For databases created before February 7, 2017, a document enters stage complete after being marked Reviewed, whether the document was checked back in or not. For databases created on or after February 7, 2017, a document will enter stage complete ONLY IF the document has been marked Reviewed and is currently in a batch that is checked in.

Removing batches and removing unreviewed documents from a batch

Under the Batches tab, you can remove a batch. To remove a batch, simply click the "..." option, and click on Remove batch.

 A warning message is displayed. Click Remove. 

All documents (unreviewed and reviewed) are removed from the batch and the batch gets deleted. The documents that are still responsive to the stage source(s) will be available for rebatching. The documents that are no longer responsive to the stage source(s) will be removed from the stage.

To remove all batches, click the Remove all dropdown list in the Batches tab and click Batches.                

The following warning message is displayed. Click Remove. 

Removing unreviewed documents from a batch

Under the Batches tab, you can remove unreviewed documents from a batch. To remove unreviewed documents from a batch, simply click the "..." option for the batch, and click Remove unreviewed documents.

A warning message is displayed. Click Remove. 

All unreviewed documents are removed from the batch. Of the removed documents, the ones that are still responsive to the stage source(s) will be available for rebatching, and the ones that are no longer responsive to the stage source(s) will be removed from the stage. The batch gets checked in and is marked completed.

Similar to how all batches can be removed, unreviewed documents can be removed from all batches at once. To remove all unreviewed documents, click the Remove all dropdown list in the Batches tab and click Unreviewed documents from batches.

The following warning message is displayed. Click Remove. 

Tracking progress

DISCO's review stage metrics further assist you in the management process by providing you with a deeper understanding about the pace of review, tag rates, and overall findings. Such insights can not only help with staffing and budgetary considerations but also identify and correct anomalies early in the review process.

In the Manage Review Stage screen, you will see a list of Review Stages.  Review metrics are unique to each review stage. Click Open in a Review Stage card to see the Metrics tab for that Review Stage.

Review metrics are unique to each review stage. To see the metrics for a particular review stage, click the review stage card on the left and then click Metrics.

The metrics are broken down into three areas:

• Pace – Displays the team’s overall review pace along with the median pace of active reviewers. DISCO will estimate how long the review will take based on the current review pace.
• People – DISCO provides charts that show reviewer pace (active hours and documents per hour) and tagging rate by reviewer. These charts provide insight into the overall review, and highlight outliers among your review team.
• Findings – View the percentage distribution of tags applied within the stage. Double-click a specific tag to review the associated documents.

All reviewer progress, regardless of role, is tracked when using Review Stages. However, regular reviewers and admins may access documents in DISCO through the search. This activity outside of Review Stages is not tracked on the metrics page.

For more information, see Metrics for review stages.

Quality control

To analyze the accuracy of your reviewers, you can quality control the different stages:

1. Create either the QC approved tag or the QC defect tag. See Working with tags for more information.
2. Run a search using the syntax sample() to review a subset of the documents that have passed through the first stage.
   
   For example, running sample(20%,"stagecomplete(FPR)") will return a randomized sample of 20% of the documents that have completed First Pass Review.
3. To drill in deeper and see the documents tagged by a specific reviewer, run the search sample(10, tag(by reviewer@example.com)).
4. (Optional) Mass tag your search results with a tag such as QC Sample 1 to save and access your quality control batch at a later time.
5. Review the sample results and tag them as necessary to identify any problem documents.
6. Determine the extensiveness of quality issues and plan for resolution.
7. Review and tag the documents with the correct tags. If there is an extensive problem, such as a general misunderstanding of tagging instructions, you should craft a new stage with a document source search that captures the affected documents to be reviewed again or reviewed by higher level reviewer.

Using documents

Once the review is complete, members of the case team can run a search on any desired issue tag, review the documents in DISCO, and use them outside of DISCO by adding some or all of the appropriately tagged documents to Exhibit Sets. Alternatively, you can batch print documents directly from DISCO.