Friday, 25 February 2011 Gonsowski argues that gone are the old ways of legal discovery, where armies of reviewers would read huge volumes of documents at early stages of court cases. The introduction of eDiscovery tools has allowed “one lawyer to do the work of 500”. At its infancy, it was met with some reluctance from law firms, as legal discovery became more efficient and less profitable. However, the adoption of technology-assisted review was inevitable, with the developments of technology and society’s reliance on a digital world. Technology-assisted review does not aim to replace all human involvement. – Perhaps to the relief of lawyers nervous about being replaced by a machine! As Gonsowski explains, it consists of many approaches, including keyword searches, Boolean search, conceptual search, clustering, relevance ranking, time line analysis and sampling. Its cumulative effect is that it reduces the number of documents that the human reviewers will have to review. Traditionally, the legal field has always considered the human review to be the “gold standard”. However, in both Gonsowski’s and our own experience, not only is it significantly more costly, there is also a question on quality, as it gives rise to human bias and errors. The final part of the article discusses what is perhaps the latest and greatest development to the technology-assisted review landscape – Perceptive coding. This uses complex algorithms to understand and learn the patterns behind a reviewer’s tagging process over a subset of the documents and applies the same logic over the entire document set. If predictive coding does what it claims to do, it is likely to be a significant game changer in the market and a potentially huge competitive advantage exists for early adoptive law firms. In the long run investing in technology will cut costs, improve efficiency and lead to a more sustainable kind of growth rather than investing in armies of paralegals. The question is: Will this new era of eDiscovery be met with the same level of resistance by traditional thinking law firms, or will they embrace it and reap the rewards? Read the full article. Disclosure: KordaMentha provides eDiscovery services using the Clearwell platform.