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I'll soon be starting my first full-fledged doc review for a couple of weeks. How much will this suck? Any tips? Do people generally care if I stay at home for some of it so I don't waste 90 minutes a day commuting when I already know what I'm doing all day? Or is that too firm-specific to answer?

I have not heard of people staying home for doc review.. I did it once for about a much before I took a job in finance. My experience was in Texas.

The building we were assigned to was a building that was damaged during the hurricane, and it was undergoing repairs. The bathrooms did not even work on our floor.

As with many doc review stories, the start date was not clear, probably delayed by about two weeks from the original ad. (I found it on Craigslist). Even on the first day, NOBODY knew how much work we would have or how long the project would be for. There were about 50 of us, JD's and licensed attorneys. Rumors for it being about a week, 3 months, or half a year. Nothing was clear. It turned out to be for about 6 months.

The work is redundant. Our work was comprised of ̶r̶e̶v̶i̶e̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ looking at oil and gas contracts, and extracting certain information from it into a software suite commonly used in the doc review world known as Relativity. Basically everyone is working off the same inbox of files and then it goes to another group of QC'ers who check what's been done.

Tier 1 - Tier 4 law school grads and attorneys working side by side. Some of the supervisors are rude. I saw a couple people including myself get yelled at in front of everybody for not copying and pasting correctly. Thankfully our staffing company was flexible, there wasn't a strict attendance policy. They encouraged serious overtime. We could come in as late as 10, as long as we hit our weekly hourly minimums.

You're experience will depend on the supervisors you have and how strict they are. The work sucks. It just sucks. It will be mind numbing. The only positive thing is that you can network, and then hopefully one of your colleagues in doc review will land an associate attorney position somewhere and help you out. Try you're best to do some pro bono stuff on the weekends (wills and estates) while you're doing this so you can still be attractive to employers while applying.

Most of the stories I have heard and read about are far worse than my experience. But good luck!

Sounds like OP works at a firm and is not a contract attorney. OP, probably firm specific.

Doc review has a bad reputation but it's actually not that bad. And in 3 months you will be missing how easy those hours were when you're scrounging to put together 8 in a day with 20 discrete tasks instead of one giant batch of docs.

Working from home is very firm (and really partner) specific.

PMan99 wrote:Doc review has a bad reputation but it's actually not that bad. And in 3 months you will be missing how easy those hours were when you're scrounging to put together 8 in a day with 20 discrete tasks instead of one giant batch of docs.

Working from home is very firm (and really partner) specific.

Seconded.

You will probably be getting calls from seniors about individual documents or asking you to do discrete tasks. See if your assistant can fwd your calls from your office to your cell, if so I would just stay home. As long as you are responsive to calls and are hitting your batch targets nobody will notice where you are physically located.

Some clients at my firm require that any user of the doc review tool be signed on through an approved IP address or one that is tied to the firm. This means you either have to VPN or Citrix in to review which can really slow down the review software.

I'd ask an associate above you.