Marks track the overall characteristic for each document and are most frequently used to track what will happen with the document at the time of production or if it has been reviewed when it is a document produced by an outside party.
By default, all marks are set to propagate to all copies of the document. When the review team requires families to be marked consistently the mark propagation must be removed from each mark.
This allows for the review team to review through the documents quickly and avoids one copy of a document being marked to produce and another copy as privileged.
When a document is part of a family (email + attachment) consider the document on its own merits and not in relation to the email to which it is attached.
For example, in a litigation about an employment contract, the email forwarding the employment contract to the attorney for review is certainly privileged, however, the contract itself is not. In that example marking the attached contract as privilege would also mark the copy in the “my docs” folder.
The privilege is in the email itself. At the time of production, all privilege emails and their attachments will be withheld from production. The copy of the contract in the My Docs folder would be produced but not the copy attached to the email.
When an email has multiple attachments with varying marks, the attachments can be managed at production time.
In this example a slip sheet would be inserted for the privilege document which would read “this document intentionally withheld”. To avoid the discussion of missing family members, most teams include the non-responsive documents in families as they will appear in the parent email as a listed attachment.