Thompson Legal Transforms Discovery Document Preparation

Employment litigation generates massive document volumes. A typical wrongful termination case at Thompson Legal might involve personnel files, email chains, performance reviews, and internal investigations—often totaling thousands of pages. Before producing these documents in discovery, the firm must redact information about uninvolved employees, Social Security numbers, medical information, and other protected data.

"We had a case last year with over 4,000 pages of HR documents," recalls Marcus Thompson, the firm's founding partner. "Our paralegals spent three weeks—nearly 120 billable hours—just on redaction. That's time we couldn't bill to the client and attorneys we couldn't assign to case strategy."

The firm had tried contract document review services, but the cost was prohibitive for a boutique firm, and sending client documents to third-party reviewers raised confidentiality concerns. They also evaluated e-discovery platforms with built-in redaction, but these required expensive annual licenses and complex implementations.

"We needed something our paralegals could use immediately without training, that wouldn't require us to upload confidential client documents to someone else's servers, and that actually worked," Marcus explains.

In the first year, Thompson Legal processed over 3,200 documents through SafeRedact. The time savings translated directly to the bottom line: paralegal hours previously spent on manual redaction could now be billed to substantive case work.

"We calculated $47,000 in annual savings when you factor in paralegal time and the cost of the tool," Marcus says. "But the real value is in meeting our discovery obligations without the stress. We haven't requested a single deadline extension for document production since we started using SafeRedact."

The firm has also found unexpected benefits in quality control. "The AI catches things our manual process missed—like when someone's name appears in an email signature we'd scroll past, or a phone number in the middle of a paragraph. Our redactions are more thorough now than when we did everything by hand."