Hal Marcus is Director of Product Marketing at Recommind, an OpenText company. He is one of the more eloquent proponents of the use of predictive coding, not just as a technical matter, but as a significant advance on the way lawyers deal with large volumes of documents under pressure of both time and costs.

In this interview, I begin by repeating the rather cynical old assertion that lawyers would take to predictive coding as soon as something newer came along. Is Artificial Intelligence that new thing which will persuade lawyers that it is now right for them to use predictive coding?

Hal Marcus said that OpenText is certainly seeing broader adoption of predictive coding, and not just by lawyers. For those who are cynical about the willingness of lawyers to consider new technology, it is quite something to find that they are at the forefront of applying machine learning to the work.

Hal Marcus said that the approach known as continuous learning removes some of the objections to predictive coding, since it does not need a training phase. Without the need to invest in that training stage, he said, it becomes feasible to use predictive coding for a much wider range of cases – not just for 1 in 20 cases, but for 19 in 20 cases.

Of clients known to OpenText, an increasing number are now expecting their lawyers to consider the use of predictive coding on all matters, as awareness grows as to how it can be used flexibly. This, Hal Marcus says, allows the lawyers to focus their energy on other things.

If you want to know more, there is a Recommind webinar on 26 April called Predictive Coding: Ask us anything! to be given by Hal Marcus and Alexis Mitchell, Principal Data Scientist at Recommind. There is more information and a registration form here.

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