BPO
Turning around document review faster with outsourced paralegal support
A London law firm was buried in disclosure review. An outsourced paralegal team sped up first-pass review and freed fee-earners for billable work.
Results at a glance
- +2.4x
- Review throughput
- 97%
- First-pass coding accuracy
- +27%
- Fee-earner hours recovered
- -34%
- Cost per reviewed document
documents per day
at sampling
The challenge
The firm's litigation team faced large disclosure exercises with tight court deadlines, and associates were spending nights on first-pass document review. The work was necessary but low-leverage, and it was eroding both margins and morale.
Bundling, contract abstraction and due-diligence support competed for the same limited hours. Partners needed to add review capacity quickly for peak matters without diluting the quality or the privilege controls the work demanded.
Pain points
- Associates absorbed in first-pass document review instead of advisory and drafting
- Court and deal deadlines at risk during large disclosure exercises
- Inconsistent coding and tagging slowing the second-pass review by senior lawyers
- Peaks in workload that in-house capacity could not meet without overtime
Our approach
- Assembled a paralegal team trained on the firm's review protocol and coding taxonomy
- Ran structured first-pass review with sampling and quality checks before matters reached fee-earners
- Standardised contract abstraction and bundling so outputs arrived in a consistent reviewable format
- Data handled under UK GDPR with a Data Processing Agreement and controls to preserve legal privilege
Results at a glance
The results
- First-pass review throughput rose sharply, so large disclosure sets were cleared inside deadline.
- Coding accuracy at sampling held above the firm's threshold, so second-pass review moved faster.
- Fee-earners recovered billable hours and the firm took on peak matters without overtime.
First-pass review was eating our associates alive. Handing it to a trained team meant we hit disclosure deadlines and the second pass was cleaner too.
Common questions
Work runs under a Data Processing Agreement with UK GDPR controls, restricted access to matter files and a review protocol agreed with your fee-earners so privileged material is handled correctly.
These are representative engagements. Client identities are anonymised and the metrics are illustrative of the type of results this work delivers, not audited figures for a named client.
Tell us what you need to outsource
Share your requirement and model your savings. We reply within six hours with a clear next step.
Six-hour response. UK GDPR compliant. Named UK accountability.