Law Firms Learn Staff Can Be Repurposed
March 30, 2012
I know there is considerable enthusiasm for smart software. Most of the eDiscovery vendors suggest that humans and whizzy new systems can coexist. Now, a new chapter in justifiable staff reductions may be upon us. Navigate to “A New View of Review: Predictive Coding Vows to Cut E-Discovery Drudgery” to learn that recently released research from an Ivory Tower-type says that a “predictive coding approach can do a better job of sifting through more than 800,000 documents than humans.”
For many law school graduates, scouring documents for material of value to a case has long been a secure if somewhat tedious means of entering the legal profession. This will no longer be true, however, if a new type of software lives up to its creator’s claims Known as predictive coding, it can supposedly do the same job, faster, cheaper, and as well as humans. But lawyers live to bill, so perhaps software may force law firms to get rid of staff and trust the algorithms.
We learn:
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, according to Maura R. Grossman, a New York City attorney. 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.
Attorneys, paralegals, unpaid interns, and experts in India will miss 30 percent of the pertinent documents. Smart software is the path to the future.
Some observers worry about the legal defensibility of predictive coding. But such concerns are unfounded, so long as both sides agree to its use. That’s according to Craig Carpenter, a marketer for Recommind, a software development firm focused on the legal and corporate market
But even sophisticated programs don’t actually think. Without that capacity, they cannot understand the subtle nuances and informal connections that underlie written documents. It’s unlikely that predictive coding will live up to the sales hype surrounding it. But what’s new about search vendors’ marketing is that reality is often different from Spock’s world on Star Trek.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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