It needed no great prescience to anticipate a flood of articles about US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck’s opinion in the Da Silva Moore predictive coding case (Monique Da Silva Moore, et al., v. Publicis Groupe & MSL Group, Civ. No. 11-1279 (ALC)(AJP) (S.D.N.Y. February 24, 2012). I made an early election to stand back before writing about it, reckoning that I do you better service by pointing to the best of the early reactions and then taking a broader approach myself, not least in jurisdictional terms. I may challenge from time to time the idea that the US is in any sense “ahead” of the rest of us in terms of rules and processes, but there is no challenge to the suggestion that new technology gets its most exacting trials in the fire of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and other jurisdictions can observe and learn.
In what is, I think, the only UK article thus far apart from mine, Charles Holloway of Millnet reckons, in an article headed In the jaws of ediscovery, that an English judge would take the same view as a US judge in similar circumstances. There are judges and judges of course, on both sides of the Atlantic, but I think Charles is right. Millnet know whereof they speak in this regard, having been involved in the only UK predictive coding case whose outcome has been written up publicly – see my article Two predictive coding case studies emphasise time and cost savings, which involves a US case involving Epiq Systems well as Millnet’s UK one.
The present article points to some (by no means all) of the commentary which has appeared already, allowing me to go on to take a slightly different approach in my separate article.
The best plots are those which can be summarised in a few words. “Father murdered, uncle bad, Ophelia hot, Hamlet mad, all dead” tells you all you need to know about Shakespeare’s most famous play. The equivalent in respect of Judge Peck’s opinion came from Warwick Sharp of Equivio who quickly boiled the whole thing down to this: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
