This guide is for solicitors, trainees, paralegals and other staff working under appropriate supervision. It describes the review method; the exact controls and available material depend on your matter and permissions.
Before you begin
- Confirm that you are in the correct authorised matter.
- Check that the earlier and revised documents are present and their provenance is inspectable.
- Establish whether a proposed version relationship has been reviewed and approved; do not assume a filename or later upload means supersession.
Six-step review method
- Open Documents. Find the earlier and later versions. Check the source details and original text.
- Check Document versions and lineage. Confirm what relationship was actually recorded and approved. Review alternative or competing branches where relevant.
- Inspect the downstream impact. Review the affected evidence and any recorded connections to findings, issues, chronology, tasks and working drafts.
- Read the relationship label. A directly evidenced task is different from a task linked indirectly through an issue. The latter requires the lawyer to trace the intermediate issue and its sources.
- Review the legal work. Consider whether the revised source changes support, contradiction, materiality, a date or a procedural step. Do not assume the new document automatically controls.
- Record the professional decision. The responsible lawyer decides whether to retain, qualify, revisit or update the work through normal governed processes.
Worked synthetic example: construction notice
Earlier record: The documents suggested that an instruction arrived on 14 March. Revised record: A corrected record now indicates 18 March. Issue: Whether the contractor complied with the relevant notice requirement. Indirect task: Review the notice-compliance assessment. The task might be flagged through its issue link, not through a direct citation to the corrected record.
What should be recorded?
- The source versions, relationship and material changed passage.
- The affected issue and task, identifying whether the connection is direct or indirect.
- Supporting, adverse or missing evidence, including limits of the document population.
- The supervising lawyer's decision and any authorised follow-up.
Related learning
The existing Document Lineage training film explains version relationships and source preservation. It was made before R1 A1 and does not itself demonstrate the newly added indirect task behaviour.
Explore the Document Change Impact feature → · Watch the existing Document Lineage guide →