Guest post written by Jon Resnick
Jon Resnick is an attorney and Worldwide Vice President of Field Operations at Applied Discovery, a division of LexisNexis.
According to IDC’s “2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos,” the world’s information is doubling every two years, with a colossal 1.8 zettabytes expected to be created and replicated during 2011. Mashable suggests visualizing this amount of data as requiring storage in either 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads or 200 billion 120-minute HD movies - which would take one person 47 million years of 24/7 viewing to watch. This massive amount of data being created each year directly increases a company’s difficulty in not only organizing data, but also in identifying and tracking key information.
The exponential growth of data has specifically affected the legal profession, where the amount of data being produced is outpacing the ability of humans and technology to cost-effectively manage and review it. In lawsuits past, lawyers traded boxes of documents and reviewed them by hand, page by page, for evidence. With increased amounts of data becoming available electronically, discovery gained an e- and moved from bankers boxes to online review. Today, e-discovery involves collecting, processing and hosting documents, along with e-mails and a variety of file types, so teams of lawyers can review them before delivering the responsive data to the opposing side. Duplicate documents and obviously nonresponsive e-mails, such as personal messages, and anything predating the dispute, are removed automatically, often using keywords.
In litigation and government investigations, lawyers have a duty to disclose all documents related to the dispute, no matter where that data lives: whether it’s on a laptop, on a smartphone, across multiple servers, or in a cloud-based database. Therefore, this information explosion has transformed what was once a challenge akin to walking up a steep hill into hiking Mount Everest. For example, in a recent lawsuit it filed, the U.S. government buried the defendants’ lawyers in over 250 terabytes of data (enough paper to store in the Library of Congress about 20 times over).
A CIO or general counsel tasked with handling the document requests during a lawsuit understands how unwieldy it is to provide years of company data, consisting of large amounts of information, during the discovery process without the right resources. That’s where automation has stepped in. The latest breakthrough has come to be known as “predictive tagging,” which essentially teaches the e-discovery software what types of documents are relevant to each case. Complex algorithms help the program learn to “review documents,” marking those documents for responsiveness or privilege.
Will this technology effectively replace all human document reviewers? The short answer is simply no. Despite all the technological advances in e-discovery and document review, without human guidance, machines cannot handle the complex decision making that ultimately determines whether a document is responsive. Lawyers must first manually go through a sample set of documents and teach the program what is relevant and what is not. Once the software has learned what to look for, legal teams can benefit from the software’s quick prioritization of data. But ultimately, it is still the lawyer’s job to confirm the results.
Predictive tagging is particularly indicative of how automation and human comprehension must collaborate to efficiently complete the task of reviewing data. Essentially, they need each other. Because humans have to teach software how to “understand” and therefore treat certain data, people are an indispensable part of the process. Yet, without the accurate culling that software performs, the amount of data would be too large for humans to manage and review alone. As an added benefit, some software and e-discovery providers can monitor the speed, progress, and accuracy of the human reviewers to determine their efficiency and competency.
That’s where automation reaches the boundary of practicality. Indeed, software is brutally efficient; it doesn’t fatigue, and it never makes a mistake. Then again, it cannot stray off a given course. Therefore, human intuition, awareness of nuances and ingenuity will always need to play a part in the process.
As we have learned from the late Steve Jobs, the best solutions to big problems come from that potent mix of critical thinking, powerful technology, and intuitive design. That’s where e-discovery has made its niche, and it is why the sector has gone from a cottage industry to an industry replete with multibillion-dollar companies in just over ten years.
Complex data problems require unique, specialized solutions. Technology will always offer some of the tools required to find the answer, but ultimately it is the legal team’s final decisions that matter. Automation is the engine, but it is not in the driver’s seat.
