Sydney Litigation Boutique Runs Discovery 80% Faster
A 9-lawyer commercial litigation boutique in Sydney uses Quillio for discovery review in Supreme Court NSW, Federal Court, and regulatory investigations. The firm now reviews discovery datasets 80% faster than with traditional document review — processing 150,000-document sets in under 2 weeks where it previously took 10+ weeks.
What they were trying to solve
The boutique was routinely briefed on matters where discovery sets ran to 80,000-250,000 documents. The economics of manual first-pass review by juniors — even with aggressive coding and offshore paralegal support — were straining fixed-fee and capped-fee matters. The principal did not want to expand to a paralegal factory model, but junior burnout was real.
Why Quillio
Quillio handles discovery first-pass review: relevance coding against the pleadings, privilege flagging including legal advice and litigation privilege, and key-issue tagging aligned to the Scott Schedule. The firm's juniors and senior associate do QA review over Quillio's output, escalating anything ambiguous to the principal.
Implementation
The firm ran Quillio against a closed 60,000-document discovery set from a prior matter, compared to the firm's original coding, and achieved a 97% coding alignment. That benchmark was the basis for rolling Quillio out across all active discovery matters.
Measurable outcomes
For a standard 150,000-document commercial discovery set
Calculated against the firm's previous offshore paralegal + junior cost base
Measured against senior associate QA sample across 3 matters
Juniors no longer pull long nights during discovery windows
Capped-fee and fixed-fee litigation is more financially viable
"Discovery was the one part of litigation where I could see a junior visibly lose their love of the law. Quillio has taken that away. The juniors are reviewing the AI's output on the ambiguous documents — which is where judgment sits — instead of first-passing a hundred thousand emails themselves."
How it works in practice
Discovery review in Supreme Court NSW and Federal Court of Australia, privilege assessment, Scott Schedule preparation, and regulatory document production.
What they avoided
Expanding into an offshore paralegal factory model or walking away from larger-discovery matters that the firm could not profitably service manually.
Case study FAQs
How does Quillio handle legal professional privilege?
Quillio applies privilege tests for legal advice privilege and litigation privilege under s118 and s119 of the Evidence Act 1995 (Cth/NSW). The senior associate QAs the privilege coding before any document leaves the firm.
What about Federal Court practice notes on discovery?
Quillio is configured to the Federal Court's Practice Note GPN-TECH and the relevant Supreme Court practice notes, including staged discovery and categories-based discovery.
Does it integrate with Relativity or Everlaw?
Yes — Quillio processes documents from the firm's review platform (Relativity or Everlaw) and writes coding back. The review platform remains the system of record for production.
How does it handle foreign-language documents?
Quillio translates and codes foreign-language documents in the same workflow, flagging any where translation confidence is lower for human review.
What about regulatory investigations — ASIC, ACCC?
The firm uses Quillio for ASIC s19 examination preparation and ACCC compulsory notice responses, including identifying privileged and commercially sensitive material before production.
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