Not all that long ago a new philosophy emerged in the e-discovery industry which was to view e-discovery as a science -- something that is repeatable, predictable, and efficient, with higher quality results and not an art or something that is recreated with every project. Underpinning this transformation was the emergence of new intelligent technology known as TAR (
technology-assisted review), predictive coding, machine learning, or simply AI. It was a "smarter review tool" meant to mimic and automate the document coding of a human reviewer. This approach was to deliver real results when it comes to controlling the costs of litigation. And given it was "artificial intelligence driven" we'd see perfection.
Well, not quite. Over the last few years we have reported from the trenches of e-discovery review centers across the country ... the stories of failure after failure of predictive coding software. Just this past Spring we wrote about a TAR project that yielded 1000s of unresponsive documents ... all dutifully "second reviewed", as they were directed, by the team of human reviewers. Hundreds of hours were spent on them until a supervisor noted they were all unresponsive.
"Why didn't somebody tell me!!" she screamed across the review room. Well, at $28 an hour (with no OT pay for hours worked after 40), no health insurance, living job-to-job ... ya just stretch out the hours, don't ya?
Side note: it may not belong here, but it's a pet peeve of ours. Contract attorneys are often maligned, sometimes with good cause. But the streets of American cities are haunted by their ghosts, destroyed by the thugs of commerce and technology. Amid the bacchanal of "legal disruption", let us pause to honor the disrupted. They hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little, often next to nothing.
So ...
behold! ... Jonathan found yet
another major TAR failure, this one being the TAR used for
In Re: Domestic Airline Travel Antitrust Litigation, the airline antitrust litigation in which American Airlines, Delta, Southwest and United, Delta, and Southwest were accused of colluding to reduce seat capacity in order to fix ticket prices. The piece is from our friends at Logikcull and the author,
Casey Sullivan, notes:
The legal industry has been slow to adopt TAR, and not just because gargantuan MDLs make up only a tiny share of the national docket. The cost, complexity, and potential risk of such processes seem to have prevented their wider adoption. Cases like In Re: Domestic Airline Travel Antitrust Litigation are unlikely to help TAR take flight.
