Electronic Discovery: What is Linear Review?

What is linear review?

A “linear review” is a traditional review of documents within an electronic discovery review platform.This means that the legal team, review team, or investigators, will look at one document after another, ordered by date or keyword relevance.  This is very much a brute force method to reviewing the documents, looking at one document after another, until the entire data set is complete.

If the aim is to review the entire mail box of one custodian, this is probably the best method of conducting the review.

But if the aim is to find documents relevant to a breach of contract across company, over a a 5 year period where there could well be millions of documents, a linear review will either be hugely expensive or impossible to attempt, due to the time, resources, or costs involved.

In these large scale reviews, concept searching methods or “non-linear” review are often employed, as they are the only feasible method of approaching the task.