LegalTech Day 1

The annual e-discovery and legal technology show kicked off yesterday morning. WortzmanNickle were there to see what’s hot, what’s not and what’s the same.

As expected, Predictive Coding led the charge of buzz words once again this year. Many vendors offered their flavour of machine learning technology. However, some vendors appear to have realized, as we have, that Predictive Coding alone will not solve the dilemma of ever increasing e-discovery volumes and ever decreasing budgets and timelines. These forward thinking software developers are now integrating Predictive Coding into a package that includes all the tried and true e-discovery technologies, such as concept clustering, near duplication, email threading, and our trusted friend, keyword searching.

While there are many claims of unique Predictive Coding approaches, they all generally fall into one of two main categories – either quickly teach the computer up front what you’re looking for and then have it find your relevant documents, or let the computer observe as you search and find relevant documents using other methods, so that it can subtlety influence the result and present you with more likely relevant documents to review.  Both methods should theoretically end up with the same results.

Wortzman Nickle will be exploring these two approaches over the next couple of months and report in upcoming blogs and papers on the costs and benefits of each methodology.

Sophisticated software can help lawyers, not replace them

On March 5^th, the New York Times published an article entitled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software” which discussed the “new e-discovery software that can analyze millions of documents in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost consumed by human lawyers, even deducing patterns of behaviour”.   It discussed the explosion of electronically stored information, the technology used to analyze that data and how all this has disrupted the legal job market.

The article provided a clear and concise overview of the new systems available to assist legal teams.  However, the conclusion that these technologies will replace “expensive lawyers” misses the mark. All of the technologies mentioned in the article require a combination of machine and human interaction in order to operate. Humans have to “teach” the computer to identify relevant information. As with any educational process, the more highly skilled the teacher, the better the lesson will be. What the technologies will replace are lawyers working at very basic levels without a strong understanding of the case.

Although the new technologies will force lawyers to learn new ways to approach document discovery, the technologies are just one cog in the legal machine. Lawyers still need to understand the content of the documents to build their case. The new systems will help lawyers to zero in on the documents containing the relevant content.

No matter how sophisticated a computer system gets, it can’t make subjective evaluations. The legal process is not black and white – it’s ultimately based on judgement and inference. As a result, it will always require highly skilled talent.

More from Wortzman on Early Case Assessment

Susan Nickle and I have spent a busy week meeting with vendors and assessing litigation support tools on behalf of several clients.  The new built-in features to several of these tools allow organizations and law firms to conduct their own early case assessment in-house. This became the focus of many of the meetings we had this week.  This really ties into Nickle’s post last week with respect to in-sourcing and how much of the e-discovery process should be conducted in-house by large Canadian organizations.  As the tools are developing so rapidly, we see many ways for our clients to put themselves in a position to conduct early case assessment efficiently and in a very cost effective manner.

 Despite an initial collection of hundreds of thousands of e-mails for review, early case assessment tools have allowed us to manipulate our searches and the data to cull the collections down to very manageable review sizes.  Coupling that with the review tools that allow for clustering, threading, boolean and other types of searches, we are identifying manageable review sets of data that can be triaged in a matter of days.  Trial counsels are then able conduct a serious assessment of their case.

 Susan and I  continue the quest to find the best tools to allow our clients to manage their e-discovery reviews, both in conjunction with external support and in-house.  The reaction from our clients has been overwhelmingly positive as they see the results of the early case assessment work

Wortzman on early case assessment..

I have just finished a cross-country conference tour.  I started on September 16^th at the Sedona Conference, Getting Ahead of the e-Discovery Curve: Strategies to Reduce Costs & Meet Judicial Expectations in Vancouver.  Moving east, I then participated in the Canadian Institute: Class Actions Litigation conference on September 23^rd in Toronto discussing e-discovery issues.  The last part of my travels took me yet further east to Halifax on September 30^th to an Insight conference, E-Discovery and E-Documents.  I can now safely say that I have heard from external counsel, in-house counsel, vendors, records management and IT participants on their latest issues and concerns surrounding e-discovery in Canada. 

The buzz at all three conferences seems to be “early case assessment”.  While the never ending issues of preservation and proportionality were discussed, there was a tremendous focus now on costs and how to reduce the costs of e-discovery.  Peg Duncan and I prepared a paper for the Sedona Conference called e-Discovery: Bringing Down the Costs which garnered much interest at the conference.  I have since had several calls and questions from lawyers and in-house counsel wanting to discuss early case assessment tools.

In practice, I have recently been involved with two cases where we have very successfully used early case assessment tools to quickly identify key electronic records in massive collections of data.  Although this is not the end of the e-discovery review, it has allowed counsel to inexpensively and very efficiently identify key documents for their cases.  It is the inexpensive part that our clients are most interested in achieving.

Wortzman and Nickle continue to look at early case assessment tools to provide our clients with advice on the best way to assess and analyze their electronic records and their case, early in the lifespan of a matter.