Was Samsung Deal a Watershed for use of Machine Translation in FTC Second Requests?

http://ow.ly/aVfe7

An article by Bob Ambrogi posted on the Catalyst Secure website.

This article discusses the recent approval for the use of machine translation during a 2nd request by the FTC during a review of a prospective deal involving Samsung.

The article states, "...before the deal could be consummated, it had to await Second Request review by the FTC, a fast-track, discovery-like process that gives the FTC the documents and information it needs to evaluate whether the proposed transaction may violate antitrust laws.

One Million Pages to Translate

For the attorneys at Paul Hastings, the Second Request process was further complicated by one simple fact—the vast majority of the documents they had to produce were in Korean, but the Second Request process requires all documents to be produced in English. Based on the firm’s preliminary estimates, of roughly 350,000 documents they had collected, 200,000 were in Korean. At an estimated five pages per document, Paul Hastings estimated that they could be facing as many as a million pages of Korean-language text."

The law firm Paul Hastings faced significant challenges associated with this second request, as the article outlines, both time and cost were major hurdles. The firm relied upon machine translation to complete the 2nd request.  The article states, "As the FTC was quick to note, the machine-translated documents did not have the same level of quality as the hand-translated materials. However, Paul Hastings took the position that the translations were sufficient to allow the agency to identify relevant materials for further review and to seek hand translation of particular documents as necessary. In the end, the Second Request process ran its course and the FTC allowed the merger to close.

In this case, at least, machine translation was sufficient to allow the process to reach its end. Not only that, but by using MT, Paul Hastings saved its client a huge expense."  The article provides further comments from Michael S. Wise, of Paul Hastings regarding the far-reaching implications of the Samsung deal.

P.S  The author states in closing,  "The story of how lawyers can use technology to streamline e-discovery is not just about predictive coding. With machine translation, the story now has another chapter."