Rolling Productions or One Final Set: How to Choose

Rolling tranches or one final set: RAND (2012) found review made up 73 percent of the cost of producing electronic documents.

Should you produce documents on a rolling basis or all at once?

Roll when speed matters and privilege is thin. Hold one final set when privilege or leverage is at stake. Review at cents per document, not dollars, keeps either affordable.

What you need

• The request for production and its service date. Your written response is due within 30 days of service.
• A privilege sample drawn from each custodian before you commit to any dates.
• A signed clawback agreement covering inadvertent production of privileged material.
• A review platform that applies one privilege gate to every tranche and keeps processing under your own keys. Check its configuration as well, because one AI setting can waive work product even when ordinary use does not.

Steps

1. Sample the collection for privilege. See how many sampled documents involve counsel. Dense privilege favors one final set.
2. Rank the documents by what they do to settlement value. Early tranches shape how the other side values the case, so pull the documents you would put in a deposition hot-doc binder before you set the order. Favorable evidence shared early can also reveal what you do not have.
3. Choose the schedule. Pick rolling when the request is broad, privilege is thin and the court wants movement. Pick one final set when privilege calls are dense, damages are high and the claims are heavily contested.
4. State your dates in the written response. The response must give a date for at least a partial production. For a rolling schedule, give the expected start and end dates.
5. Fix the privilege log timing before the first tranche. Agree on one log after the final production, since rolling logs collect corrections, omissions and clawbacks.
6. Lock each tranche once it is approved. A Gartner Peer Community thread on process documents describes the same discipline: approved final versions are locked for changes and stay published until the next review cycle. Treat every production volume that way. No one edits coding on a set that has already gone out.
7. Check new privilege calls against earlier tranches. In our platform, every answer links back to the exact exhibit it came from, so you can open the earlier call and confirm the new one matches before release. The evidence on hand does not measure how often rolling productions trigger clawbacks, so I would track that figure on your own matter, tranche by tranche.
8. Record what went out. Log each tranche's Bates range, date and withheld documents, so the production history is documented from the first volume to the last. That record also makes turning the reviewed set into a trial exhibit list far simpler.

Common mistakes

• Logging privilege per tranche. Fix: agree one log, due after the final production.
• Letting coding drift between tranches. Fix: rerun the earlier privilege calls against each new set before it ships.
• Agreeing to early informal exchange in a contested case. Fix: hold out for formal requests when the opposing answer leaves no room for a quick settlement.