I took part this week in a podcast called Will Judges Think It Is Okay To Use Clustering and Suggestive Coding Tools? which was led by Karl Schieneman of ESI Bytes. I was the token Englishman alongside US top-drawer participants Judge Grimm, Judge Facciola, and Maura Grossman of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, who is also Topic Authority in the Legal Track of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC).
As its title implies, the podcast concerned the acceptability of technology like clustering and what is variously called “suggestive coding” or “predictive coding”. Karl used the term “suggestive coding” so I will stick with that. These technologies aim to reduce the volumes which must be subjected to this most expensive (and most inaccurate) method of making document decisions. The starting point, for a lawyer or a judge, is the need for competent, ethical, co-operative and proportionate discovery, and a recognition of the role which technology must play in this. It is technical stuff, as Judge Grimm observed at the outset of our podcast, referring approvingly to Judge Facciola’s observations in US v O’Keefe about what judges and lawyers may dare opine in the face of technological complexity and about angels fearing to tread. The volumes, the technology and the expected standards have all increased substantially since then.
You can listen to the podcast yourself, so I will not do more than list some key points which came out: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
