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Just hit 100 hours on a single document review and it changed my view on these cases
I was working on a big merger case for a client in Chicago, and the initial discovery haul was huge. My team thought we could get through the main document set in about 60 hours. Last night, my tracker hit 100 hours just on the initial review, and we're not even halfway done. The sheer volume of internal emails and draft agreements we found has completely shifted the strategy. It's not just about the contract terms anymore, it's about the negotiation trail. Anyone else had a case where the prep time blew past your first guess by that much?
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bettyhunt3d ago
The coding system idea is smart, but I found that even color coding wasn't enough once we hit 80+ hours. What really saved us was setting a hard timer for each batch of documents. I told my team, you get 45 minutes per 200 docs, no exceptions. It forced everyone to stop trying to read every single email like a novel and just scan for the key words we agreed on. The negotiation trail in your merger case must be a nightmare though. All those drafts show exactly where the other side tried to sneak things in or backed off. That kind of detail is gold for the deposition prep later.
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jadeg812mo ago
Man, I feel that. Had a product liability review where we thought it was just spec sheets. What saved us was making a really simple coding system early on. Like, one color for "safety mention," another for "cost talk," and a third for "boss knew." It turned a mountain of tech memos into a clear picture of who dropped the ball and when. Stopped trying to read every word and just hunted for those flags.
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