Ah okay - that notice is definitely a factor then and an important consideration not initially mentioned. So as long as you have someone else working on the other issues described then we can focus on the patterns concept I initially mentioned.
Several things that stand out when I'm reviewing links on a mass scale.I prefer to look at links grouped by domain in the first pass to help see these patterns.
1. Page titles of pages sending links. Quite often, they're titles that blatantly scream junk/low-quality or irrelevant to any topic your site is about, or even link-partnerships... or even outright mention SEO.
2. Domain names/URLs of pages sending links. Same concept - they can quite often obviously communicate that they're junk, irrelevant, or blatantly specifically sites for SEO or links.
3. Anchor Text - if you group by anchor text as a next pass, look for links where the anchor text is exact match keywords and then look at the page title of that linking page and it's domain name. Patterns can be spotted of low quality. If needed, you can click over to a URL and just look at the page that link is coming from.
4. After all that process, as you have marked links as being bad, regroup them by domain. At that point you will likely still need to go through remaining links and go to at least one link from each domain to examine the page or just look at the overall domain for quality.
NOTE - the part where you examine a site sending links does require you to be able to know how to spot a bad site already. Like - "Can I trust this site?" "Is this site obviously a fake site?" and other such questions need to be asked and answered.
And if a link is on a good site, is it a forum or blog comment? Is it using an SEO relevant keyword as the person's signature name? Or is it even a legitimate and relevant comment, even if the link isn't using keyword anchors?
There are so many subtle indicators I could add but in reality the best way to go is to dive in and remember to look for patterns. As you spend the time doing this work, patterns become more and more obvious...