Tasks like redaction are no longer "just" a review action – they're ways to create exponentially valuable work product in the face of ever-growing and increasingly-costly document universes.
You can turn the black boxes of redaction work product into metaphorical gold for your eDiscovery coffers – lowering the cost of expensive and time-consuming manual reviews – without automating away a user's control over implementing proper review.
To explain how, let's:
Address the benefits of opting for manual review despite the emergence of reliable technology-assisted review tools, automating solutions, and AI.
Acknowledge the realities of growing document universes and how managing them is essential to mining value from them.
Define what valuable work product looks like in the age of exponential doc growth and increasing review expenses.
Show ways to create secure, reusable redaction work product that add value to a bottomline while improving the reviewer experience.
The Need for Manual Review Tasks – Even Manual Redaction
Increased document volumes can be extremely burdensome and are one of the causes for climbing review costs. It is also true identification and redaction of sensitive information continues to be burdensome even in advanced platforms.
These challenges are largely driven by different types of document review, especially those that can be very time-sensitive, such as second requests, DSARs, and PII review. These processes lend themselves to long, sprawling, manual review without taking advantage of existing work product. To account for the unique nature of the documents, these processes often involve a significant number of reviewers meticulously reading and drawing boxes manually with minimal-to-no opportunity to leverage time-saving technology without compromising their ability to conduct a properly thorough review.
What's more, while modern advances in review platforms such as ECA, AI, and other improvements to TAR, the work product the reviewers generate is not typically used to inform and simplify future work. The review tasks are performed once, at great time and cost, to then never be seen or heard from again.
The New Normals of Document Universes
Due to the general affordability of disk space and the prevalence of easy-to-access corporate data storage options, enterprise businesses are increasingly reluctant to eliminate anything that may represent intellectual property or have a potential business purpose. Many organizations are holding onto massive quantities of data as a path of least resistance when enforcing IT, security, and records management policies.
According to Cyber Security Ventures, the total global data storage is projected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025, roughly 50% of which will be in cloud storage.
These systems are often expensive to maintain effectively and are targeted by hackers and other bad actors for exploitative gain. According to a study conducted by Apple in 2023, data breaches have grown by over 20% yearly.
What's more, Security Boulevard reports the growth of documents containing sensitive or personal information also drives challenges like correctly classifying the PII businesses store, building systems for purging sensitive records, and application-level monitoring and automation.
This combination of more, larger document volumes, increased risks, and tightening regulations has put immense pressure on review teams to properly identify and secure sensitive personal information.
Why Reusable Work Product Has Value
Finding ways to reuse work product is critical to avoid the burdens of a repeat review – which arise most often because of the need for consistent, accurate reviews across matters involving the same documents or evolving and ongoing matters like those often seen in litigation.
Work product reuse is the process of recalling and learning from old datasets to make document review more efficient and consistent from matter to matter. – CCBJ
Long, sprawling, and manual reviews can quickly become the norm. However, leveraging some form of existing work product in these "process-driven" use cases can streamline stages and ensure they are performed correctly when performed repeatedly.
Three Ways Blackout Produces Secure, Reusable Work Product
Blackout Suggestions, for example, show reviewers data they've previously redacted throughout the review for repeat action. Blackout Migrations allows review teams to migrate and merge markup sets within or across workspaces. Redaction Templates are another way Blackout makes more use of work product by using simple existing redacted documents for rapidly marking up forms and legal documents.
Suggested Redactions
Blackout Suggestions supercharges your reviewers as they redact documents in a case. As a reviewer moves from document to document placing redactions, Suggestions quickly learns and tracks their previous redactions.
Migrate Markups
Blackout does more than ensure that your work product informs manual workflows. It also enables the mass reuse of work product within and across workspaces.
A multi-purpose tool, Migrate Markups enables a wide range of efficiencies. The following is a sample of powerful capabilities provided by the tool, which take advantage of the work product your team creates.
The propagation of markups to duplicate images and Excel files
The propagation of markups across markup sets
The merging of markup sets
The propagation of markups across duplicate documents in different workspaces
Image Template
One of our most long-standing tools, Image Template Projects, allows your teams to redact a document once and copy those markups across duplicate or similar documents.
Commonly used to handle forms and government documents, simply draw redaction on the first form, and with the click of a button, redactions are placed in the exact locations across an entire saved search of documents.
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