e-Discovery MOVES the need for expertise – does not REMOVE it

e-Discovery MOVES the need for expertise – does not REMOVE it

e-Discovery MOVES the need for expertise – does not REMOVE it

A Forbes article ” What Technology-Assisted Electronic Discovery Teaches Us About The Role Of Humans In Technology” – by (Ben Kerschberg @benkerschberg) – sparked an interesting discussion on twitter.  What caught my eye?  The article’s description of ‘attorney surprise’ that e-discovery success in leveraging search or predictive coding would be affected by having good search terms or seeds.

According to Forbes’ follow-up article by Karl Schieneman, it’s not new for the legal domain to have a blind-spot obscure the role of technology as an enabler.  He proposes corrective surgery 😉 – grafting technical heads onto the legal team to create a Legal Hydra.

Mike McBride (@mikemac29) tweeted the link to the ‘role of humans’ article.  The following stood out to me as the highlights of that two-page article:

… the publication of an authoritative “law review piece, which effectively debunked the notion that manual review offers an unimpeachable gold standard. The authors succinctly summarized their statistically validated findings as follows: “This article offers evidence that . . . technology-assisted processes, while indeed more efficient, can also yield results superior to those of exhaustive manual review, as measured by recall and precision.” [emphasis added in blog]

….relying upon technology and legal and subject matter knowledge alone—without the support of any additional expertise—will rarely allow attorneys to achieve the best possible results, and it may weaken the overall defensibility of the approach. Given that most technology-assisted review is founded on statistical algorithms and linguistic pattern detection, empowering these systems with the expertise of linguists and statisticians results in much greater flexibility and often higher quality and more readily defensible results in less time. It also enables a more effective allocation of resources, since statisticians and linguists can develop protocols for attorneys’ sampled reviews, perform in-depth data analyses, generate reports and summaries of findings, and implement innovative solutions that would, at best, be distractions for attorneys, who should ideally be free to focus their attention on case strategy. With each team member playing to his or her talents and training, the review effort realizes greater efficiency, higher quality results, and reduced production time and costs.

  • mikemac29mikemac29: Reading- What Technology-Assisted Electronic Discovery Teaches Us About The Role Of Humans In Technology http://t.co/sby6fmf410:27pm, Jan 10 from ifttt
CersysIncCersysInc: @mikemac29 Not REALLY news that cross domain expertise vital 4 ediscovery. Uses law knowledge plus foundations of search sw: stats, language 8:50am, Jan 11 from HootSuite
mikemac29mikemac29: @CersysInc no not a shocking revelation, but many with legal background have not considered importance of being familiar with search.8:57am, Jan 11 from Twitter for iPhone
CersysIncCersysInc: @mikemac29 It’s a pattern. Adding tech rarely removes need for expertise: it MOVES the need earlier in the process, applied more abstractly9:16am, Jan 11 from HootSuite
mikemac29mikemac29: @CersysInc not when tech = “magic” and things just happen for you. ;-)9:30am, Jan 11 from Twitter for iPhone
CersysIncCersysInc: @mikemac29 That’s why tech is autoMAGIC. Blindspot risk also w/ Ethical walls & conflict checking, blogged it yesterdayhttp://t.co/cjHpzkzv9:53am, Jan 11

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