Yesterday morning, my husband’s company directed all employees to work from home for the ‘foreseeable’ future. Last night my kids’ school, as well as schools from several surrounding towns, was shut down indefinitely due to students testing positive for the Coronavirus.  This morning a slumber party my daughter is attending this weekend was cancelled. And I have cancelled my trip to North Carolina next week because it isn’t critical for me to be there.

The Covid-19 strain of the Coronavirus is spreading here in the US and people are self-quarantining and transitioning to a work-from home model.  Which is great for corporate employees, but what about hourly employees tied to the office, to retail or otherwise?  This has to be hitting them really hard.

And yet, work has not been impacted at all – not for me, not for my coworkers and not for my document review attorneys.  And it’s got me thinking about how much different ‘working’ is today than it was 5 or 10 years ago.

10 years ago I was commuting from Connecticut to NYC 5 days a week, managing about 125 onsite document review attorneys in a downtown Manhattan office. 5 years ago I was flying all around the world (literally) to manage and lead large teams of onsite document reviewers in review centers in the US, Europe and Asia.  Today, I am writing this blog from the comfort of my home office, equipped with my laptop, a 30” wide-screen monitor, a soft-phone, a printer/scanner and high-speed internet and still I’m able to manage our reviewers located all across the US.

I am so thankful (more so than usual) to be working at TCDI right now because our normal model is a work-from home approach for our document reviewers, as well as for a high percentage of our Discovery and Cyber teams.  Our onsite document review centers are currently closed in an over-abundance of caution, but all of our reviewers are still working, without interruption and without concern for gathering with others who may be infected or affected by this rapidly spreading and highly-contagious virus.

Many eDiscovery companies continue to keep their document review offices open and are struggling with maintaining staff willing and able to come into the office.  TCDI is just carrying on with business-as-usual.  We already have our Virtual Review Center in place to allow for safe and secure remote document review.  We already have this platform and our policies vetted and audited by our current clients and we already have all the supporting documentation and audit material for new clients who also need to continue with business-as-usual. We are not throwing something together for this, this IS us.

While other document review providers are currently worried about how to meet deadlines or budgets this month (and next) due to self-quarantined reviewers or are scrambling to setup platforms for remote review that their clients are comfortable with, we, at TCDI, are concerned with the safety and well-being of our team members and our clients. We don’t have to worry about deadlines, budgets or infrastructure because we already did that in 2017.

We often talk about the benefits of our Military Spouse Managed Review (MSMR) and Remote Review program being flexibility, scalability and security.  In this current climate of quarantine and health-safety, these 3 benefits have turned into necessity.

TCDI is like FEMA right now.  We are able to step in and offer assistance and relief to anyone who is impacted by Covid-19 and who is concerned for the continuity of their EDD or document review projects.  This way of working, from home, safely and securely, is not new to us and we’ve got it down from a process and security standpoint.

Already? All ready!