Deborah Blaxell shares the latest developments in e-disclosure
In the UK, the number of cases involving large data volumes has increased significantly over the past decade. In response, Practice Direction 31B was introduced in 2010 to encourage parties to manage electronic documents “efficiently in order to minimise the cost incurred”, and to use technology to assist in this process (Pt 6(1) and (2) Practice Direction 31B).
Technologies to simplify the search and review of such complex and voluminous information have developed at a pace. A relative newcomer is the predictive coding or computer-assisted review tool, a process by which software is “trained” by an expert (usually a senior lawyer) who has reviewed a representative sample of the documents and registered the relevance or otherwise of each document reviewed on the system. In this way the expert “trains” the technology to recognise responsive patterns.
Technology in practice
Initially, the expert feeds a sample of documents into the technology. Samples may be randomly selected or consist of documents which the expert considers to be
