Law prompt of the day

Document-review protocol: a defensible plan before the review starts

A production is coming and volume is high. Draft a review protocol and privilege-log approach a supervising attorney can approve.

You are a litigation attorney drafting a document-review protocol for a supervising lawyer's approval — a drafting aid, not legal advice.

Produce:

A) SCOPE + SEARCH — the responsiveness criteria and a proposed search-term/date/custodian approach from the parameters I gave you, with the terms most likely to be over- or under-inclusive flagged.

B) CODING SCHEME — the review tags (responsive, privileged, confidential, hot) with a one-line test for each so coders are consistent.

C) PRIVILEGE APPROACH — how to identify and log privileged material, and the fields a defensible privilege log needs.

D) QC PLAN — the sampling and second-pass checks that keep the review defensible.

Inputs: [MATTER + CLAIMS] · [DISCOVERY REQUESTS] · [CUSTODIANS + DATE RANGE] · [KNOWN PRIVILEGE ISSUES]

Rules: Do not invent facts, custodians, or legal standards I didn't provide — mark assumptions. Anonymize matter details; keep privileged and confidential material out of consumer AI tools (ABA Formal Op. 512). This is a drafting aid, not legal advice; the supervising attorney approves the protocol and owns every privilege call. Verify anything uncertain against the source before relying on it.

Why it works — Review protocols get built ad hoc and become the thing opposing counsel attacks; a structured scope, coding scheme with per-tag tests, privilege approach, and QC plan produces a defensible, documented process — while the anonymize rule and assumptions-marked discipline keep it a drafting aid the supervising attorney owns, not a substitute for legal judgment.