The conventional way to handle a large document population is to divide it. One group reads the finance materials, another the correspondence, a third the technical files, and a summary travels upward. It is efficient, and it reliably loses the thing that matters, because the important fact in a commercial case is almost always a connection between two documents that were never filed together.
So we staff cases small and ask everyone on the team to read across the whole record. That is only possible because the firm is small and the teams are smaller. It is also the reason we turn down matters where the volume would make it impossible.
The practical effect shows up in argument. When a judge asks where a date comes from, the answer comes from the lawyer standing at the lectern rather than from a note passed forward, and the follow-up question can be answered too.
