http://ow.ly/7liEh
An article by John Markoff published by the New York Times in the Science section.
This article discusses the ability to use artificial intelligence software to reduce the costs of the discovery process, and the accompanying attorney-review.
This article states, "Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.
“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”
Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions."
The article discusses technology, and how it is impacting society as a whole, as well as the legal profession.
In addition, The article further points out, "E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”
The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”
The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.
Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities."
The article discusses two specific eDiscovery review technologies, Clearwell and Cataphora. The article states, "Another e-discovery company in Silicon Valley, Clearwell,has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords, shortening the time required to locate relevant material in litigation.
Last year, Clearwell software was used by the law firm DLA Piper to search through a half-million documents under a court-imposed deadline of one week. Clearwell’s software analyzed and sorted 570,000 documents (each document can be many pages) in two days. The law firm used just one more day to identify 3,070 documents that were relevant to the court-ordered discovery motion.
Clearwell’s software uses language analysis and a visual way of representing general concepts found in documents to make it possible for a single lawyer to do work that might have once required hundreds.
“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question? It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”
P.S. Should you be interested in the technological solutions mentioned in this article, feel free to contact Joe Bartolo, of SRM Legal. SRM Legal is a "Gold" level Clearwell partner, and also has experience working in conjunction with Cataphora as well.
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