eDiscovery Institute Launching Technology Assisted Document Review Study

Feb. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- Patrick Oot, General Counsel and Co-Founder of the Electronic Discovery Institute (“EDI”) called today for providers to participate in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of solutions that automate or expedite manual review in litigation, using a document set provided by Oracle. According to Oot, “Oracle is enabling EDI to conduct the technology assisted document review study by providing a large set of its records that have already been reviewed manually in litigation.  Hogan Lovells, the firm that conducted the initial review and production, will assist. That assistance will be invaluable since they are already familiar with the documents.”  Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is also participating.  Wendy Curtis, chair of Orrick's ediscovery working group, asserts "counsel, courts and clients need a common understanding of what these tools can accomplish and how they support the requirements of FRCP 1."

Oot went on to say that, “A substantial portion of the ever-escalating amounts of money that companies spend on litigation is spent reviewing electronic records to select those that are responsive to discovery requests. When that is done with a manual, document-by-document review, the costs can be staggering. Technology assisted document review has the potential to dramatically lower the costs of selecting records for production and speeding the litigation process.  This study provides independently reviewed metrics on the quality and costs of various technology assisted document review solutions compared to manual review. This could speed the acceptance of technology assisted review methodologies by courts and by corporations.”

A previous EDI study on document categorization involved a set of Verizon documents that had been reviewed as part of a response to a government investigation. The same set of records was reviewed by two different document categorization systems and the results were compared with the original review decisions as well as with each other. A subset of documents was also manually examined by a second team of reviewers and those results were compared as well.  The results showed that the automated approaches were generally as likely as the second team of manual reviewers to select the same set of records as the first manual review team, but at a substantially lower price and in far less time.

Those results became the basis for a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology as well an article in the Denver University Law Journal.

EDI co-founder Anne Kershaw, who along with EDI co-founder Herb Roitblat, Ph.D., participated in the initial study and co-authored the articles stated that “Many practicing lawyers know that the old document-by-document linear review doesn’t work very well with the tremendous numbers of electronic files in today’s productions, but nobody wants to talk about it. Further, many companies are not willing to share their experiences with other companies. Oracle’s assistance in providing data for this study we hope will  pave the way for more organizations to provide the data and information we need to benchmark, test and report on developing technologies that may reduce costs and improve processes.”

Herb Roitblat indicated that EDI, Oracle, HoganLovells and Orrick Herrington will be documenting the test protocol and making a selection of vendors over the course of the next three to four weeks. Results will be posted in a report on the EDI website and made available at no cost.

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About the Electronic Discovery Institute
The Electronic Discovery Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization that attempts to identify and promote technologies and processes that can lower the cost or improve the quality of handling electronic discovery. The EDI website, www.LawInstitute.org has reports and articles available at no cost relating to its prior work in evaluating document categorization and conducting industry surveys on duplicate consolidation, email threading and predictive coding. Its most recent publication, the “Judges’ Guide to Cost-Effective E-Discovery,” has been distributed in print form to over 600 U.S. Magistrate Judges and is available in electronic form at no cost on the EDI website.

Contact:
Barbara Hanahan
barb@lawinstitute.org
202.525.6684
1625 Eye Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20006