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I’ve finally recovered from my yearly “Brand Bowl” hangover. For those not familiar with the event, Brand Bowl is where the best and the brightest companies march on the field of battle, your television, to try to win consumers’ praises and pocketbooks. The action is intense, broken up only by intermittent bouts of football and halftime shows. Costing $3 million for a 30-second spot, the stakes are high. To the victors, a viral buzz worth 10 times the money spent; to the losers, a costly blemish to their brand identity.

A relatively new type of entrant to the competition are companies that give away their product for free. Seven of the advertisers this year offered some type of free service. There was a time when free was all the marketing you needed. In fact, I once saw a video of people pushing and crowding to get an unappetizing plate of cold beans and hot dogs simply because it was free. Technology has changed the playing field. Free email, free data storage, free open source software — the list of free products goes on and on. Now even free needs a multi-million dollar commercial.

Not to be left out, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite free tricks when it comes to document review. Inherent in every document is a telling piece of metadata that provides a human-based classification system created by the document author him- or herself. Many of you know this valuable piece of data as “Original File Path.”

Why is this important? Just think of your own personal computer. When you save a document, the first question asked by the system is where should it be saved? In our Microsoft-centric world, we are most accustomed to using a folder tree. The folder choice helps us remember where to go when we find this document in the future. To save space, like documents are usually foldered together around a central topic.

Examples of How You Can Use Folder Trees

This built-in organization structure is a seldom used but powerful tool to accelerate document assessment. How so? Here are just some of the possibilities for how you can make use of folder trees:

• Accelerated Review: Short on time? Identify the largest folders first to quickly move them through review. In my experience, I’ve seen thousands of documents moved by a single reviewer in just a few hours by sampling and bulk coding similar documents.
• Opposing Party Production: Start your review by searching for folder names that are most relevant to your case. A great way to prepare for rapidly approaching depositions.
• Hot/Privileged Review: Found a really hot document or a crucial privileged attorney-client communication? Take a look at the folder that the document came from. Chances are you will find more where that came from.
• Low-Hanging Fruit: If reviewing for an intellectual-property case, it would make sense to pay special attention to the folder named “Patent Revisions” while offering just a cursory review of the “Employee Picnic 2009” folder. This low-hanging fruit is easy to identify and provides a great jump start to any case.

Review is an ever-growing cost of litigation. Any device that you can use for free should be a welcome change. While technologies such as clustering, semantic indexing and predictive coding have an important part to play in modern document review, at times their cost can be prohibitive. Depending on the size of the case and the amount of financial resources available, free might just be exactly the right price for your client.