---
name: document-review-protocol-builder
description: >-
  Designs defensible document-review protocols for litigation, arbitration,
  investigations, or regulatory productions. Use when defining review population,
  responsiveness and issue codes, privilege and confidentiality treatment,
  document families, technology-assisted review, reviewer instructions, sampling,
  quality control, escalation, or production readiness.
---

# Document Review Protocol Builder

Create a repeatable protocol that different reviewers can apply consistently and
that preserves a review decision's source, reason, and quality-control history.

## Intake

Obtain the mandate, jurisdiction and procedural orders, pleadings and issues,
collection map, review population and processing report, requested categories,
search methodology, technology platform, document languages, confidentiality
regime, privilege law and client structure, production specifications, team roles,
deadline, budget, and known high-risk custodians or subjects.

## Method

1. Define the review universe and exclusions. Reconcile collected, processed,
   deduplicated, promoted, excluded, corrupted, encrypted, and unreviewable items.
2. Translate the issues and requests into concise responsiveness, issue,
   confidentiality, personal-data, hot-document, and technical-problem codes.
   Give inclusion, exclusion, and boundary examples without inventing case facts.
3. Define family treatment for emails and attachments, duplicates, near-duplicates,
   threads, loose files, embedded objects, containers, versions, translations, and
   structured data.
4. State the applicable privilege categories and required facts. Create separate
   paths for withheld documents, redactions, potentially privileged material,
   privilege exceptions, common-interest or joint-client issues, and inadvertent
   production. Do not infer privilege from lawyer involvement alone.
5. Define escalation triggers for unclear scope, novel issues, personal or secret
   data, technical failure, potential crime-fraud or equivalent exceptions,
   inconsistent family coding, and material adverse documents.
6. Specify reviewer training, calibration, decision notes, coding permissions,
   batching, re-review, audit trail, productivity reporting, and conflict controls.
7. Build quality control using reasoned samples: random and targeted checks,
   confidence or error reporting where supported, senior review, disagreement
   resolution, corrective action, and re-sampling. Do not claim statistical
   assurance without a valid design and complete figures.
8. If analytics or technology-assisted review is used, document objectives,
   inputs, validation, sampling, stopping criteria, limitations, human oversight,
   version changes, and reproducibility. Do not describe opaque scores as truth.
9. Define production readiness: responsiveness, family completeness, privilege,
   redaction, confidentiality, metadata, numbering, format, exception handling,
   and final sign-off.

## Output

Provide the protocol, coding dictionary, decision tree, issue-and-request map,
privilege and redaction rules, reviewer escalation matrix, training examples,
quality-control plan, exception log, production gate, and change-control record.

## Guardrails

Do not instruct reviewers to suppress adverse or inconvenient material, encode
legal conclusions unsupported by counsel, disclose privileged review notes, or
permit automated tools to make unreviewed dispositive decisions. Protect reviewer
access, client confidentiality, personal data, source material, and audit logs.