The Challenge of Foreign Language Document Review

Cross-border matters are becoming more common and complex due in part to widely divergent privacy regulations worldwide. Organizations will often rely on external providers to manage e-discovery outside the U.S., but some providers won’t have the capability to screen and manage quality. When working with local reviewers, qualification is important. Conducting foreign language e-discovery requires a specialized talent pool, knowledge base and skill set.

Security and compliance with data privacy regulations need to be priorities for cross-border teams, but can be undermined by local practices. For example, many reviewers and translators outside the U.S. work from home, taking sensitive data out of the controlled environment of the review center. Experts with experience in handling these issues can help ensure that review and translation activities take place onsite, in secure locations. This is an important factor in reducing the risk of data breaches.

For some languages, the marketplace is so small that a single matter in a particular region could dramatically increase costs. Providers who have a foothold in the local area can be invaluable when there is a need to review in these languages.

When a skilled team applies clustering or predictive coding across a multi-language data set, it increases the efficiency of the review. This practice can be applied to translation as well. Using analytics technology to evaluate the document set can help reduce the number of documents that need to be translated, leading to cost savings.