Document production

The shape of one

Stripped to essentials, a production runs through the same stages regardless of size:

Identify and collect. Work out who holds responsive material — the custodians — and get it out of their systems in a way you can describe later.

Cull. Filter to what is actually responsive by date range, search terms and custodian, ideally on terms agreed with the other side rather than chosen unilaterally.

Review. Read what survives, for responsiveness and for privilege.

Number. Stamp the complete set with Bates numbers, including documents you intend to withhold.

Pull and log. Remove privileged documents and account for them in a privilege log.

Format and deliver. Convert to whatever the protocol specifies — imaged TIFF with a load file, PDF, natives, or a mix — and produce.

The format question

What “in an agreed format” means is where most production disputes live. A protocol negotiated at the outset specifies image format and resolution, load file structure, metadata fields, native carve-outs, and how parent-child relationships are expressed.

Where no protocol exists, the default expectation is generally that documents are produced as kept in the ordinary course of business or organised to correspond to the categories requested — but the specifics of what that requires, and what a receiving party can insist on, vary by jurisdiction.

Scale changes the answer

A production of two hundred emails and a production of two hundred thousand are different activities that share a vocabulary. The small one is a paralegal, a converter and a numbering tool over an afternoon. The large one needs deduplication, email threading, technology-assisted review and a vendor.

The mistake worth avoiding is running a large production with small-production tools, discovering the problem at the numbering stage, and having to redo the formatting work from the beginning.