Regarding litigation, documents reviewed by attorneys are obtained through the discovery process, which is generally governed by rules of procedure for the presiding court.
[2] During the doc review process, each document may be tagged according to certain categories, including whether it is relevant to an issue in the case, whether it is responsive to a discovery request (and therefore may need to be produced as part of the discovery process), whether it is confidential, or whether it is attorney client or otherwise privileged.
The terms electronic discovery and technology assisted review have arisen to reflect the dominance of electronically stored information and the increasing use of machine learning and other technologies to help curb the growing cost of document review.
[3][4] At times, even with the use of electronic document review platforms the volume of documents that need to be reviewed by an attorney for a case can be expansive and many attorneys including even highly staffed international law firms will need to obtain assistance beyond their standard resources.
In recent years, many legal staffing companies have begun to act as intermediary employers between the law firms and the attorneys hired to assist with the document review.