Topic Based Review

Rhea in her article discusses the old custodian based review vs the Topic Based Review. It is alright to say that a law-firm will review all of the data that is "potential" and would not like to take chances with inadvertant culling.
But before the review starts, a review plan has to be prepared and it is very important to know the scope of the review, magnitude of the data and the time and recources that would be required. With the current methodology law-firms use keyword searches, teams of lawyers sit together to come up with the most appropriate set of terms. But more often than not these terms are over-inclusive. Other major indicator to them is document count per custodian. All these turn out pretty pale when compared to a topic-based review assignment. Automatic clustering of documents, as Rhea says, "understands" the documents and is a much accurate predictor of it's relevance. It surely gives a more accurate picture of the review that will happen in the future.