Brandon Mack is Director, Analytics and Advanced Technologies at Epiq. I have interviewed him before, and jumped at the chance to do so again at this year’s Legaltech because of his succinct and positive descriptions of the way technology can be used for eDiscovery.

He drew a distinction in opening between conventional eDiscovery tools primarily designed to minimise data volumes to more conceptual tools such as predictive coding and advanced pattern matching.

I asked him if the general run of clients (that is, leaving aside the “professional” users) understand the fast-developing technology. Brandon Mack said that some have not been exposed to as much technology as others. The tools are getting more sophisticated but the learning curve is not as long and hard as it used to be.

Clients are self-starting on the technology and asking about it after hearing of it at conferences or through videos like this. Epiq specialists sits down with them and help identify what is right for them and for their cases. There is, Brandon Mack says, growing interest as lawyers see what their peers doing. They are becoming more willing to accept technology, encouraged by persuasive clients whose money is involved in the discovery exercises.

I asked Brandon Mack if Epiq’s size is helpful for it and its clients. He said that size and the collection of skills is an asset of itself to some extent, but the main benefit of size is the chance to use multiple tools in multiple scenarios.

I asked Brandon Mack where he thinks we are going in 2018. He said that users are now going beyond the identification of relevant data and finding relationships and trends which they did not know were present – they are getting information and not just data.

Lastly, Brandon Mack said that technology-assisted review is getting better and moving faster. The emphasis has always been on bigger cases but new technology is opening the way for smaller cases to benefit from technology-assisted review. It is no longer necessary to have millions of documents to justify the use of technology and it is becoming relevant to smaller cases where a single user might be able to get through 10,000 documents with a few day’s work.