Managed Review and Expert Services

What This Solves

Large productions create a bandwidth problem. Your firm or legal department may have the expertise to supervise review, but not the capacity to staff it. Hiring and training document reviewers on short notice is expensive, slow, and inconsistent, especially when the data set includes complex technical documents, foreign language materials, or sensitive privilege issues.

GDF's managed review service puts trained practitioners into the workspace from day one. They work under GDF project management on GDF's own review platform, with daily reporting, structured quality control, and clear escalation paths back to supervising counsel. The result is consistent throughput, documented quality metrics, and a review record that holds up to scrutiny.

Technology Plus Practitioners

Managed review is not just software access. The market has moved toward recognizing that technology and human judgment need to work together for complex document review to produce defensible results. GDF delivers both.

GDF's review platform provides AI-assisted queue prioritization, privilege routing, real-time dashboards, and automated privilege log generation. GDF's review practitioners provide the legal judgment that technology cannot replace: spotting contextual privilege issues that pattern matching misses, recognizing factual significance in technical documents, and making consistent coding decisions across a diverse document set. Project managers track progress daily, adjust staffing as throughput data comes in, and flag issues to supervising counsel before they become production problems.

Review Team Composition and Training

GDF staffs managed review projects with practitioners who have backgrounds in litigation support, legal analysis, and document review. Team size scales with the project: a focused privilege review may involve three to five senior reviewers; a large commercial litigation set covering millions of documents requires structured teams with defined review tiers, team leads, and dedicated QC reviewers.

Every reviewer on a GDF managed project receives matter-specific training before the first document is coded. That training covers the review protocol, the responsiveness criteria, the privilege grounds specific to the matter, the redaction categories, and the escalation process for complex or sensitive documents. Training completion is documented. Consistency checks run throughout the project to identify drift from the protocol before it affects production readiness.

Privilege Review and Sensitive Document Handling

Privilege decisions carry the most downstream risk in any review. An inadvertent production can compromise the protection for an entire category of communications, and a missed privilege document can create exposure. GDF manages privilege review through a dedicated tier within the review team, separate from first-pass responsiveness reviewers.

Privilege reviewers assess attorney-client communications, work product, and dual-purpose documents with reference to the specific matter's privilege grounds and any applicable court orders. The privilege log is built in real time as decisions are made, capturing document identifiers, date, parties, privilege ground, and a factual description that satisfies the specificity requirements courts expect. For matters operating under a Rule 502(d) order, GDF's team follows the clawback protocol precisely, tracking every document flagged for potential clawback and generating the required notices.

Quality Control at Every Stage

QC is not a final step at GDF; it runs throughout the review. Daily QC sampling pulls a statistically valid subset of completed work from each reviewer, checked by senior team members against the protocol. The QC pass rate is tracked by reviewer and by document category. Patterns that indicate a training gap or a protocol ambiguity are escalated to the project manager and addressed before they affect a larger portion of the document set.

A formal pre-production QC review runs before any documents are cleared for export. This final check covers responsiveness coding accuracy, privilege log completeness, redaction accuracy, and any documents flagged for escalation that have not yet been resolved. The pre-production QC findings are documented in the matter record.

Expert Declarations and Litigation Support

GDF's project managers and senior practitioners are available to provide declarations and affidavits on the review methodology when counsel needs to defend the process. These declarations cover how the review protocol was designed, how reviewers were trained and supervised, what QC procedures were applied, and what the final QC metrics showed. They do not offer legal conclusions; that is counsel's role. GDF's declarations address the technical and operational aspects of the review that courts and opposing counsel may challenge.

For matters where the review methodology itself becomes a focus of dispute, GDF can provide a complete documentation package: the review protocol, training records, QC reports, AI validation metrics, privilege log, redaction logs, and the final production cover documentation.

Daily Reporting and Matter Transparency

Supervising counsel should never have to call to find out where the review stands. GDF's project managers send a structured daily status report covering documents reviewed, documents remaining, today's throughput rate, current projected completion date, privilege log item count, documents in escalation, and any protocol questions that came up during the day's review. The report format is consistent, so counsel can track trends across the life of the project without parsing different data each time.

For matters that involve outside counsel and a corporate client simultaneously, GDF can configure reporting to go to multiple recipients and adjust the level of technical detail to match each audience.

Our Managed Review Process

What GDF Delivers

At the close of a managed review engagement, counsel receives a complete package that documents the work done and supports the production that follows.

Defensibility and Chain of Custody

Every action in GDF's managed review is logged at the platform level and tracked at the project management level. The combination produces two independent records of what happened: the platform's granular audit trail and the project manager's daily documentation. Together, they support a complete methodology declaration if the review process is challenged.

Chain of custody begins at collection and runs through delivery. GDF documents who handled the data at each stage, which review platform workspace it occupied, which reviewers accessed which document sets, and how the final production set was assembled and verified. That chain does not break between collection and delivery.