Disclosure: DROZlegal publishes this guide and builds the discovery_review and disclosure_review agents, and the litigation case-detail page's settlement-offers panel, described below as part of its practice-automation product for Ontario law firms. The eDiscovery cost figures cited are drawn directly from Everlaw's own published 2026 research, not ours. This article is general information about Ontario litigation workflow, not legal advice.
Two workflows, one collision point
Discovery review and settlement tracking usually live in separate places — a shared drive folder for productions, a spreadsheet or sticky note for offers — even though they're racing against the same clock on the same file.
A missed production deadline and a lapsed settlement window are both silent failures. Nothing crashes. No error message fires. The Friday production just doesn't go out, or the offer sits unanswered until it expires, and nobody notices until opposing counsel does.
That's the gap a single case record closes: discovery status, service records, and every open settlement offer sitting next to the same deadline clock — not a replacement for the lawyer's judgment on any of them, just one place where nothing quietly falls through. See the full Litigation module for how the rest of a case file is organized around it.
The discovery and disclosure pipeline, stage by stage
Every production or disclosure item that lands on a litigation file — civil or criminal — moves through the same five checkpoints before it becomes part of the record:
| Stage | What happens | Who or what does it | Where a lawyer signs off |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Intake | Productions and disclosure materials land in the case's Documents tab | Case file — one of eight tabs on the litigation case-detail page | — |
| 2. First-pass review | Relevance, privilege, or disclosure-category coding is proposed | discovery_review agent (civil) or disclosure_review agent (criminal) | Every proposal is reviewed before it's accepted into the file |
| 3. Disclosure classification | Crown disclosure is sorted under the Stinchcombe / McNeil / O'Connor taxonomy; each job is silo-scoped to a single case | disclosure_review agent, criminal matters only | Classification is a proposal, never a filed position |
| 4. Service tracking | What's been exchanged with the other side is logged against the file | The case's service-records tab | Lawyer confirms service occurred as recorded |
| 5. Deadline check | The relevant clock — e.g., Rule 30.03's 10-day affidavit-of-documents window — is checked against the case timeline | Deterministic, no-LLM deadline engine | Lawyer confirms anything novel the rule set hasn't already encoded |
Document review consistently accounts for more than 80% of total litigation spending — an estimated $42 billion a year, per the American Bar Association's own tracking. Source: Everlaw, "eDiscovery Costs in 2026," published/updated January 22, 2026.
Both review agents are manual-dispatch and propose-only — two of the 17 (of 22 registered) agents on the AI Agents roster that never act on their own, only draft a proposal for a lawyer to accept, edit, or reject.