{"id":19927,"date":"2016-11-18T17:21:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-lawyer-and-a-computer-a-better-lawyer\/"},"modified":"2016-11-18T17:23:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:23:02","slug":"what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-lawyer-and-a-computer-a-better-lawyer","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-rctom\/submission\/what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-lawyer-and-a-computer-a-better-lawyer\/","title":{"rendered":"What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a computer? A better lawyer!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For decades, it was a rite of passage: sequestered in windowless rooms, surrounded by boxes of documents, and scolded by well-heeled partners, associates at top law firms had to \u201cput in their time\u201d doing document review for litigation discovery.\u00a0 Document review for discovery is a laborious and repetitive task akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. It is initiated in the earliest stages of a litigation proceeding and allows for each side of the dispute to gain access to relevant evidence that isn\u2019t considered privileged communication. The trouble comes in sifting through mountains of irrelevant documentation to find responsive documents.<\/p>\n

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In the pre-digital era of law, discovery meant reviewing physical documents (external correspondence, internal memoranda, sales contracts, and more). In the digital age, this information has moved from filing cabinets to hard drives. With the move toward digital, though, has come a proliferation of data – International Data Corporation predicts that the digital universe will expand to 5,200 gigabytes of data for every human by 2020[i]<\/a>, the equivalent of over 5,000 truckloads of documents! kCura, the maker of Relativity e-discovery software, has positioned itself to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the digitization challenge that faces the legal industry.<\/p>\n

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Breaking the Tradeoff<\/p>\n

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The business model of document review firms has always revolved around the customer promises of speed, cost, and accuracy.\u00a0 Tradeoffs and tension bubbled beneath the value proposition: going faster required larger teams and more layers of management and thus increased cost, accuracy meant hiring smarter people who demanded higher wages and thus increased cost (and even then did not guarantee accuracy[ii]<\/a>), and increasing accuracy often meant adding QC stages and thus slowed the process. kCura\u2019s approach, though, is to break these tradeoffs with the application of e-discovery technologies for a faster, cheaper, and more accurate review.<\/p>\n

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Delivering the Unthinkable<\/p>\n

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The earliest use of technology in the review process amounted to little more than keyword-searches that weeded out large percentages of documents that did not contain relevant keywords. This process, while faster and cheaper than the manual review of yore, had major accuracy problems as responsive, non-privileged documents were ignored simply on account of the absence of certain human-picked keywords, with the FTI Journal noting that \u201csuch searches have been shown to produce as little as 20 percent of the relevant documents, along with many that are irrelevant.\u201d[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

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While e-discovery as an industry has taken off in relation to the increase of ESI (electronically-stored information), kCura\u2019s Relativity technology is leading the way.\u00a0 Driven by proprietary \u201cpredictive coding\u201d software, Relativity uses TAR (technology-assisted review), or supervised machine learning, to \u201cshow\u201d computers what is responsive instead of \u201ctelling\u201d them.<\/p>\n

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Building the Future<\/p>\n

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While Relativity has driven forward a major shift in how discovery is conducted, it\u2019s technology is quickly becoming commoditized.\u00a0 Given their first-mover advantage, however, and the strong reputation they have established with key clients, there are several opportunities for them to stay one step ahead of the digitization challenge.<\/p>\n

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