Disclosure failures in the courts fall into two main categories – either someone has failed to read the rules properly or a deadline has been missed, usually because the work involved was underestimated.
In this short video, one of a series given by CYFOR, Lawrie Hall, Head of Case Management at CYFOR, talks about how modern technology can be used to help lawyers comply with deadlines.
One way is by the use of analytics such as predictive coding. While this is not the sense in which the word “predictive” was originally attached to this technology, its use can help lawyers predict both the time and cost of dealing with an eDisclosure exercise. Specifically, the prioritisation functions rank documents by their presumed degree of relevance, and this makes it possible to identify the point at which documents cease to offer a value proportional to the cost of dealing with them. That helps define the scope of the project.
Lawrie Hall mentions also online review tools in this context for their ability to track how particular reviewers are doing – there is a balance to be struck between review speed and error rates, and the tools built into most online review systems allow this to be tracked. This may result, Lawrie Hall says, either in some further explanation being given to reviewers or in the reallocation of resources.
eDisclosure Information Project 