Legal Kanoon IQ 2 min read

Privilege at the scale of a disclosure exercise

In a large review, the cost is not the privileged documents. It is the hundreds of thousands that are not, and still have to be looked at.

The situation

A disclosure exercise, a due diligence, a regulatory request. Several hundred thousand documents, of which a small fraction are relevant, a smaller fraction are privileged, and the rest have to be excluded by somebody who looked.

The work is given to a review team at volume. The quality question is not whether the reviewers are competent. It is whether the exercise is consistent across the team and across the weeks, and whether the basis for any given call can be reconstructed months later when it is challenged.

Why it is hard

Consistency across reviewers is the defensibility problem

Two reviewers applying the same protocol to similar documents should reach the same call. Where they do not, the inconsistency is invisible unless something is measuring it.

Privilege is contextual

The same email is privileged in one matter and not in another. A classifier trained on documents, divorced from the matter and the parties, is answering a different question from the one asked.

The record of the decision is the deliverable

When a privilege call is challenged, what matters is the basis recorded at the time. A call with no recorded basis has to be made again from scratch.

How we approach it

Kanoon IQ Review runs an AI-first pass for relevance, privilege and issue coding against the matter's own protocol, parties and date ranges, and routes the output to qualified Indian reviewers for human quality checks rather than treating the first pass as the answer. Contract extraction runs on the same corpus for diligence work.

Every call carries its basis and its reviewer. Sampling runs across reviewers and across time so drift is detected while the exercise is still running, and the whole audit trail exports at the end as the record of how the review was conducted.

What changes

An AI-first pass over the full corpus, with trained Indian reviewers checking it
Privilege assessed against the matter's parties and protocol, not in the abstract
Every call carries its basis and its reviewer for later challenge
Project-level access controls and an exportable audit trail

Is this your problem too?

Bring the version of it you actually have. We will tell you what it would take, including when the answer is that it is not worth doing.

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