Use Case
For Corporate Legal Departments and GC Offices
Government investigations, employment litigation, regulatory responses. In-house legal teams managing these matters without full outside-counsel review infrastructure need a systematic first-pass review that holds up on privilege.
The In-House Legal Challenge
Corporate legal departments face a discovery calculus that outside counsel rarely does: how much of the review to internalize before outside counsel engagement, and how to control privilege risk on C-suite and general counsel email collections where the privilege profile is most complex.
- Government subpoenas (SEC, DOJ, FTC) arrive with tight response timelines and high privilege risk. In-house teams managing the initial privilege cut before outside counsel engagement can reduce the cost and document volume of the outside-counsel hand-off
- Employment discrimination and internal investigation matters generate HR and legal team correspondence that requires consistent privilege treatment — the type of collection where inconsistent tagging creates production disputes
- Outside-counsel billing rates for document review are the primary cost variable in litigation. Moving the first-pass review and privilege cut in-house with the right tools changes the economics of responding to litigation
Scenario: SEC Investigative Subpoena Response
SEC subpoena covering 5-year email collection from 8 executive custodians including GC, CFO, and CEO. In-house legal team needs to complete initial privilege cut before outside counsel engagement to control the volume and cost of outside review. C-suite email has high outside-counsel correspondence volume — the most complex privilege profile.
Attorney roster loaded with outside counsel firms from the relevant 5-year period. Privilege scan prioritized on executive custodian collections. GC email routed to separate privilege review queue with in-house associate counsel making initial privilege determinations before any document reached outside counsel review queue.
Initial privilege cut completed internally. Outside counsel hand-off volume reduced by eliminating clearly non-privileged documents before billing clock started. Privilege log pre-populated with attorney confirmation step. Audit trail available for cooperative disclosure to SEC staff attorney on review methodology.
Scenario: Employment Discrimination Class Action
HR and legal team correspondence covering 3-year period from 12 custodians across 5 regional HR offices and the legal department. Inconsistent tagging risk because HR correspondence patterns vary by region and seniority level. Employment counsel reviewing HR documents needs consistency across the collection, not per-custodian variation.
Seed set constructed with representation from all regional HR offices and the legal department. Custodian role mapping weighted legal department correspondence for privilege priority review. Consistent tagging model applied across all regional collections so employment counsel saw uniform classification, not per-reviewer variation.
Uniform tagging methodology across multi-region HR collection. Employment counsel QC focused on exception set rather than full re-review of high-confidence documents. Production set delivered with audit trail showing consistent application of review criteria across all custodian collections.
Walk through your matter type with us.
Bring your subpoena scope, custodian profile, and outside-counsel relationship. We'll map the in-house review workflow.
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From corporate legal practitioners.
The cost difference between handing 300,000 documents to outside counsel versus handing them 90,000 after an internal privilege cut is the kind of calculation the board understands. That's what Discovarc makes possible for an in-house team our size.
Associate General Counsel, Fortune 1000 manufacturing company
Managing a government investigation response with an internal team requires a workflow that holds up on privilege. The audit trail and privilege log documentation gave us the paper we needed when the agency's staff attorney asked about our review methodology.
Deputy General Counsel, regulated manufacturing enterprise