Remember when document review meant actual boxes in a room?

I was thinking about this case I worked on back in 2015 for a big insurance dispute. We had a team of six people in a windowless room for three weeks straight, going through maybe 40,000 paper pages. The worst day was when someone knocked over a whole cart of binders and we had to start a section over from scratch. Now everything is a PDF on a server and you can search it in seconds. It's faster, but you lose that weird team feeling of being in the trenches together. Anyone else miss the old war room chaos, or is it just me being sentimental?

3 comments

3 Comments

terrymitchell7d ago

You're right about the team feeling, that weird bond from shared misery. But do you think the old paper method actually made us better reviewers? Like, did having to touch every single page force a different kind of attention that we've lost now with keyword searches?

emerydixon4d ago

Remember finding a coffee stain that flagged a whole section for extra checks, stuff a search would miss. @terrymitchell is onto something with the touch thing, your brain connects info to a physical place on a page. We traded that deep pattern spotting for speed, and now weird outliers slip through.

jana_davis907d ago

Totally get what you're saying. I mean, you had to actually look at every single page back then, so you'd catch weird stuff a search would never find, like a handwritten note in the margin. Now you just trust the computer to find the important bits, but it only knows what you tell it to look for. Maybe we were more careful because the work felt more real in your hands, idk.