A New View of Review: Predictive Coding Vows to Cut E-Discovery Drudgery

http://ow.ly/6HjPw

An article by Joe Dysart published on the ABA Law Journal....with a date of October 1, 2011 (Wow....predictive coding truly is the future, since today's date is September 28, 2011)

This article provides ammunition to the argument that predictive coding technology is as accurate (if not more so) than traditional attorney review methods.  As the article states, "

There has been a long-standing myth in the legal field that exhaustive manual review is the gold standard, or nearly perfect, but that has been shown to be a fallacy,” says Maura R. Grossman, counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City. “Humans manually reviewing large numbers of documents for responsiveness make errors.

“Research has shown that, under the best circumstances, manual review will identify about 70 percent of the responsive documents in a large data collection. Some technology-assisted approaches have been shown to perform at least as well as that, if not better, at far less cost.”

In fact, Grossman recently released research (PDF link available in the article) with co-author Gordon V. Cormack, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, that concluded software using a predictive-coding approach can do a better job of sifting through more than 800,000 documents than humans."

The article goes on to state, "But the technology’s use at law firms is still so new, many question its legal defensibility, although that mindset is beginning to change, according to Craig Carpenter, vice president of marketing at Recommind, a predictive-coding software provider based in San Francisco.

“What often happens is that both sides will essentially agree that one or the other or both will use predictive coding, and that that’s fine with both sides,” says Carpenter, whose firm licenses its software at $650 per gigabyte of data searched. “It doesn’t make it defensible, but it makes the potential defensibility not an issue at all.”

Perhaps the only worrisome facet in this new wave of search is that a machine is now promising to do the same work that was previously the realm of entry-level new hires. More than a few fresh-out-of-law-school types are probably wondering: Is predictive coding my friend, or should I stick a pencil in my computer fan?"

P.S.  Auto-Review and Predictive Coding technologies will continue to develop, and they are certainly not going away.