The Document Family Circus

Of the three listed in my last post, a family is the most well-defined and consistent relationship used in e-discovery.  “Family” is the most commonly-used term and universally recoginzed, but the same type of relationship is also referred to as a “message unit” or “message attachment group”.  When it comes to families, every single document falls into one of three categories: (1) parent, (2) attachment, or (3) standalone.

1. Parent:  There are only single-parent families in e-discovery – each family has one and only one parent document.  Most often, the parent is an email with attachments, but other types of documents are also treated as parents.  A document is the parent of any documents embedded within it, such as a Word document with an Excel file inside it represented by an icon.  Often .zip container files are treated as parents, with the files inside considered attachments.
2. Attachment:   Any document that’s part of a family is an attachment, unless it’s the parent.  If an email is attached to another email, it is considered an attachment even if it has its own attachments.  While some review tools will let you navigate to a document’s immediate sub-parent, all documents under the topmost parent are still identified as part of just one single family.
3. Standalone:  A standalone document has no family members at all.  Most files collected from non-email sources and emails without attachments are standalone documents.

In most cases, a unique metadata field in the review database will have an identifying number common to all members of a family.  In a Concordance load file, this may be “BegAttach” (described in the Production Metadata Checklist).  It may also be a special “Family ID” or “Message Unit ID”.  When looking at a new database, one of the first things you should do is figure out how to identify members of a family using document metadata. Any data export should include this field, so you’ll always be able to see the association.

The great debate with respect to families is whether in initially reviewing the documents, it’s better to conduct a “contextual review” or a “four-corners review”.

• Contextual Review means that members of the same family are reviewed together.  This has the obvious advantage of providing context to the documents, which can be particularly important for making privilege determinations.  For example, a memo describing a competitor’s product may be tagged “responsive” when reviewed alone, but properly tagged “privileged” when reviewed alongside a parent email from outside counsel explaining that she wrote the memo to show why the competitor should be sued for patent infringement.
• Four-Corners Review refers to reviewing each individual document as if it were a standalone document.  Typically this is only done as a “first-pass” review, and must be supplemented with additional review to avoid issues like the one described above.  The main advantage of four-corners review is that it allows for more effective use of deduplication and technologies that exploit document similarities, without the burden of considering family members.

We’ll get into where the law stands on contextual vs. four-corners review in an upcoming post.