A business process outsourcing company can help organizations and law firms with reliable e-discovery and predictive coding solutions. Predictive coding is changing e-discovery strategy. It can be simply explained as one of the effective methods to gain control over increased volume of data. Today, the concept is well accepted in the legal industry, as its application in e-discovery can better save the interests of clients. Before getting into details, let us understand what predictive coding and e-discovery are.
What is e-Discovery?
Identifying and retrieving relevant information is important for speedy legal decision making. E-discovery or electronic discovery is the process of identifying relevant information for the purpose of civil litigation and government investigations. Information relevant for a particular lawsuit is often discovered in the form of electronically stored information such as e-mails, instant messaging chats, documents, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, and websites.
What is Predictive Coding?
Predictive coding is a technology used to automate portions of e-discovery document review using the techniques of keyword search, filtering, and sampling. The prime objective of this technology is to reduce the number of irrelevant and non-responsive documents that need to be reviewed manually. It is accomplished with the help of a computer program that identifies document properties and refines search parameters accordingly.
How Predictive Coding is Helpful for Lawyers
In a traditional system, lawyers start with the very first document and continue with each and every document to trace any relevant information pertaining to a case. This approach can work well when the number of documents is limited. However, it becomes quite unwieldy and expensive when there are hundreds of thousands or millions of pages to review.
Predictive coding, the lawyer-driven, computer-assisted document review process, can be of use in these kind of situations. It works on the basis of a software application that identifies document properties and refines search parameters according to rules created by humans. The software scans electronically stored information and locates data most relative to a case. In addition, it categorizes each document as being responsive or unresponsive, according to how well they match key concepts and terms in the sample created by the legal team.
Advantages of Predictive Coding in Litigation
- Helps in searching and retrieving potentially relevant documents
- By reducing the number of non-relevant documents meant for review, the overall amount of lawyer time spent reviewing documents can be reduced
- Predictive coding algorithms can be modified after successive iterations to create more productive results
- Cost of performing operations is less as
- The number of irrelevant documents hosted and reviewed is less
- The system maximizes the consistency and efficiency of the human review process
- Make decisions on strategy earlier using prioritized documents’ rankings by likely relevance
- Results generated by predictive coding algorithms can be validated through statistics, unlike the case of manual review of documents by lawyers
However, the successful implementation of predictive coding depends on the combination of diverse factors such as technology, workflow, legal review, statistical sampling and project management. It may be difficult to arrange all these components in-house and hire employees having expertise in predictive coding document review. This is where legal process outsourcing can provide the needed support.
Role of LPO in Implementing Predictive Coding
Earlier, majority of the law firms were reluctant to outsource their document review process due to lack of trust and security concerns. Now, advanced technology and improved facilities for legal research have made the document review process more secure and efficient. These positive changes have encouraged law firms to exploit the potential of LPO for complex legal processes such as assisted review and predictive coding.
Benefits of Using Outsourced Predictive Coding Services
- Enables clients to take up bigger cases that include high volumes of legal documents
- Helps legal professionals compare and sort non-relevant documents more quickly and easily
- Substantially reduces the work of lawyers who further need to review only those documents that are tagged relevant
- Increased accuracy by combining computer-assisted review with manual review
- Can be used for conducting quality check on manual document reviews done by professional attorneys
- Clients can validate the results generated by predictive coding algorithms
It is obvious that teaming up with a dedicated expert legal outsourcing provider for predictive coding and e-discovery greatly optimizes internal efficiency and cost-effectiveness of law firms. Before joining hands with an LPO partner, it is very important to investigate the experience and capabilities of the service provider and also the feasibility of working with them.
