6 time management tips for lawyers handling ediscovery

Lack of time is the most commonly cited individual challenge in Nextpoint's 2026 eDiscovery Landscape Survey, named by 41% of respondents, ahead of both budget limitations and technology gaps. Generic time management tips for lawyers rarely address the specific ways ediscovery eats into a day. For most teams, the shortage isn't really about workload. Attorneys and paralegals have always worked long hours on document-heavy matters. It's about where that time goes: work that gets redone because nothing was standardized the first time, hours lost to context-switching between matters, and tasks that never should have needed attorney-level attention in the first place.

The good news is that reclaiming that time is largely a design problem, not a staffing one. Most of the time lost across a matter is preventable with the right workflows in place, and fixing it doesn't require new headcount or a bigger budget.

In this excerpt from our eGuide, 21 Practical Tips to Solve Your Biggest eDiscovery Problems, we break down what survey respondents told us about this challenge, along with 6 practical time management tips for lawyers handling ediscovery-heavy matters.

What respondents told us

Lack of time was the most commonly cited individual challenge in the survey, named by 41% of respondents — more than budget limitations or technology gaps. But the open-ended responses made clear that this isn’t just about having too much work. It’s about how time gets consumed: by manual processes, confusing technology, reactive firefighting, and tasks that shouldn’t require attorney-level attention.

“Spending attorney time on clerical functions.” — Attorney at a small law firm

“Seems like nothing is ever intuitive in how you think it would work. So every time I have to use an ediscovery platform, it’s like learning all over again.” — Senior associate at a mid-size law firm

“Too many fire drills and bad practices.” — Senior ediscovery manager at a large law firm

“It takes extra time when it could be more efficient.” — Associate attorney at a large law firm

The theme running through all of these is preventable inefficiency — time lost not to the inherent complexity of legal work, but to process gaps, tool friction, and the absence of systems that let people work at their actual level.

6 time management tips for attorneys

1. Map your workflows to find opportunities to automate or delegate

Attorney time is expensive and finite, and document-heavy litigation creates a lot of work that doesn’t actually require attorney judgment. The problem is often less about staffing than about workflow design — if nobody has ever mapped out a typical matter from start to finish, it’s easy for manual, repetitive tasks to quietly consume hours that could be spent elsewhere.

Start by documenting your workflow and flagging every step that is rule-based and doesn’t require legal judgment: Bates stamping, file organization, deduplication, upload management, initial document categorization. Some of those steps can be delegated; others can be automated entirely. Many teams are already paying for platforms with features that could eliminate hours of manual work — they’re just not using them fully. AI-assisted review, auto-processing pipelines, and automated redaction are increasingly accessible and can return significant attorney time on larger matters.

One of the most consistent patterns I see in firms that feel perpetually behind is that attorney time is being consumed by tasks that don’t require attorney judgment. That’s not a staffing problem — it’s a workflow design problem, and it’s fixable.” ^{Anand Mathew} _{Partner of Litigation Services, Nextpoint Law Group}

2. Invest in platform training upfront — it pays back in hours, not minutes

The ‘learning it again every time’ problem cited by multiple respondents is a real and significant time sink. Familiarity with your ediscovery platform isn’t just a nice-to-have — it directly determines how fast you can work. Structured onboarding for new users, refresher training after platform updates, and a designated internal resource for platform questions all translate into measurable time savings across a team.

3. Standardize your most repetitive workflows so they don’t require reinvention

Every matter that starts from scratch is a matter that wastes time. Build templates for the tasks you do repeatedly: litigation hold notices, collection checklists, review protocols, production specifications. The investment in creating these templates pays dividends on every subsequent matter, and it means that when a new associate or paralegal joins the team, they’re not starting from zero.

Standardization is one of the highest-leverage investments a legal team can make. The teams that handle the most volume efficiently aren’t necessarily the ones with the most staff — they’re the ones that have removed the most decision-making from the routine parts of the process.” ^{Tricia Boguslawski} _{Chief Client Officer, Nextpoint}

4. Build a matter intake checklist to eliminate early-stage fire drills

A disproportionate amount of wasted time in ediscovery happens in the first 48 hours of a matter, when the team is scrambling to figure out what needs to happen. A standard intake checklist — covering client identification, hold issuance, data source mapping, team assignment, and initial scope definition — transforms that scramble into a structured process. Done well, it also surfaces potential issues before they become crises.

20. Batch similar tasks together rather than context-switching between matters

Constant switching between matters is one of the quietest time thieves in legal practice. Every context switch carries a cognitive cost — reorienting to the facts, the team, the stage, the platform setup. Where your calendar allows, batch similar tasks across matters: Do all your hold notice reviews at once, run all your ECA reports in a single session, handle all your productions in sequence. The reduction in ramp-up time adds up.

21. Consolidate your tech stack wherever possible

Switching between platforms is its own time tax. When your review tool doesn’t talk to your production tool, and your deposition prep lives somewhere else entirely, every handoff between stages creates friction — re-uploading files, reformatting data, reorienting to a different interface. Over the course of a matter, that adds up. 

Look for opportunities to consolidate workflows onto a single platform. A tool like Nextpoint covers review, production, deposition prep, case building, and trial presentation in one place — which means less time managing the technology and more time on the actual work.

Get more strategic ediscovery guidance

These 6 tips are just one piece of the picture. Lack of time is just one of four challenges legal professionals told us they're facing most, alongside document review, data collection, and working with clients to collect their own records. Our full eGuide, 21 Practical Tips to Solve Your Biggest eDiscovery Challenges, digs into all four, drawing on responses from 101 legal professionals along with field-tested advice from Nextpoint's ediscovery and legal services experts. Download the full guide to get all 21 tips in one place.

And if your team needs help streamlining workflows or consolidating your tech stack, schedule a consultation with the Nextpoint services team. They can help with workflow mapping, automation, platform training, and more.