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McKinsey & Company Any advice to help prepare for data science analyst role at top consulting firms (McKinsey & Company EY Boston Consulting Group etc)? Any materials, open source platform recommended to take on freelance data science project? When should I start actively looking and applying? I am a new grad who is working in tech as a marketing analyst I’m looking to pivot to marketing& sales data science consulting next year. Would like someone with similar backgrounds offer some practical tips.
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Harvey
People laugh but I would totally use Harvey if I was looking for a general summary of the docs. Vault can only hold 10,000 at a time but you can create 4 workspaces and upload the 40,000.
Are you at a big law firm? This is something we either have in-house e-discovery experts handle (with assistance from contract reviewers) or engage an e-discovery vendor to conduct the review. This is not a reasonable amount for an associate to manually review, nor would I think it appropriate for an associate who is not an e-discovery expert to try to just come up with searches to sample documents versus conducting a document by document review. You have to be really careful with using technology for the review because some aspects of that may have to be disclosed to the other side and/or the court.
Coach
Have you discussed with anyone at your firm (including more senior associates)? Also, if you’re at a large firm you should have an e-discovery team to help you (or something similar), but get an outside vendor to do the first level review. Your firm should have negotiated rates but they will be a fraction of the cost of associates. You’ll have to supervise them so you should understand how the review works, what’s responsive, etc. This is not particularly large and the vendors can get through 40,000 documents pretty quickly if necessary. The firm would then often do second level/privilege review and general QC/spot checking before production.
Subject Expert
You could do a test manual review for about 1-3 days to get a feel for the documents, or ask an experienced document reviewer on your team to do so.
You can look for patterns and categories that can speed up the review. Scanning the document request and file names can help you do an initial categorization of what you have. Not every page may need a close review, so you can triage.
There are advanced AI tools that may be able to help. You can also hire an outside vendor, but be sure to train them, give clear instructions on the review protocol so everyone is consistent, and provide real-time responses to questions.
Subject Expert
Sounds like you’re definitely on the right track.
How you handle this will be affected by client cost sensitivity, deadlines, and the partner’s tolerance of risk. I’ve worked in practices where every single page had be reviewed, re-reviewed, and then QC’d.
Other places were okay with doing term searches for privilege, scanning file names, flipping through the pages at rates of 40-60 pages an hour without any coding, and other speedy shortcuts.
I’ve used consilio and they’re - fine. Not great but better than racking up bills doing it ourselves. You’ll likely still need at least a couple people internally spot checking their work, norming, training them, and playing the final production (or whatever the final outcome is)