e-Discovery Team’s Best Practices Education Program

EDBP Mr.EDR Predictive Coding 3.0
59 TAR Articles
Doc Review Videos

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Information → Knowledge → Wisdom

Education is the clearest path from Information to Knowledge in all fields of contemporary culture, including electronic discovery. The above links take you to the key components of the best-practices teaching program I have been working on since 2006. It is my hope that these education programs will help move the Law out of the dangerous information flood, where it is now drowning, to a safer refuge of knowledge. Information → Knowledge → Wisdom: Progression of Society in the Age of Computers; and How The 12 Predictions Are Doing That We Made In “Information → Knowledge → Wisdom.” For more of my thoughts on e-discovery education, see the e-Discovery Team School Page.

The best practices and general educational curriculum that I have developed over the years focuses on the legal services provided by attorneys. The non-legal, engineering and project management practices of e-discovery vendors are only collaterally mentioned. They are important too, but students have the EDRM and other commercial organizations and certifications for that. Vendors are part of any e-Discovery Team, but the programs I have developed are intended for law firms and corporate law departments.

The e-Discovery Team program, both general educational and legal best-practices, is online and available 24/7. It uses lots of imagination, creative mixes, symbols, photos, hyperlinks, interactive comments, polls, tweets, posts, news, charts, drawings, videos, video lectures, slide lectures, video skits, video slide shows, music, animations, cartoons, humor, stories, cultural themes and analogies, inside baseball references, rants, opinions, bad jokes, questions, homework assignments, word-clouds, links for further research, a touch of math, and every lawyer’s favorite tools: words (lots of them), logic, arguments, case law and precedent.

All of this to try to take the e-Discovery Team approach from just information to knowledge →. In spite of these efforts, most of the legal community still does not know e-discovery very well. What they do know is often misinformation. Scenes like the following in a law firm lit-support department are all too common.

The e-Discovery Team’s education program has an emphasis on document review. That is because the fees for lawyers reviewing documents is by far the most expensive part of e-discovery, even when contract lawyers are used. The lawyer review fees, and review supervision fees, including SME fees, have always been much more costly than all vendor costs and expenses put together. Still, the latest AI technologies, especially active machine learning using our Predictive Coding 3.0 methods, are now making it possible to significantly reduce review fees. We believe this is a critical application of best practices. The three steps we identify for this area in the EDBP chart are shown in green, to signify money. The reference to C.A. Review is to Computer Assisted Review or CAR, using our Hybrid Multimodal methods.

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Predictive Coding 3.0 Hybrid Multimodal Document Search and Review

Our new version 3.0 techniques for predictive coding makes it far easier than ever before to include AI in a document review project. The secret control set has been eliminated, so too has the seed set and SMEs wasting their time reviewing random samples of mostly irrelevant junk. It is a much simpler technique now, although we still call it Hybrid Multimodal.

Hybrid is a reference to the Man/Machine interactive nature of our methods. A skilled attorney uses a type of continuous active learning to train an AI to help them to find the documents they are looking for. This Hybrid method greatly augments the speed and accuracy of the human attorneys in charge. This leads to cost savings and improved recall. A lawyer with an AI helper at their side is far more effective than lawyers working on their own. This means that every e-discovery team today could use a robot like Kroll Ontrack’s Mr. EDR to help them to do document review.

Multimodal is a reference to the use of a variety of search methods to find target documents, including, but not limited to, predictive coding type ranked searches. We encourage humans in the loop running a variety of searches of their own invention, especially at the beginning of a project. This always makes for a quick start in finding relevant and hot documents. Why the ‘Google Car’ Has No Place in Legal Search. The multimodal approach also makes for precise, efficient reviews with broad scope. The latest active machine learning software when fully integrated with a full suite of other search tools is attaining higher levels of recall than ever before. That is one reason Why I Love Predictive Coding.

I have found that Kroll Ontrack’s EDR software is ideally suited for these Hybrid, Multimodal techniques. Try using it on your next large project and see for yourself. The Kroll Ontrack consultant specialists in predictive coding, Jim and Tony, have been trained in this method (and many others). They are well qualified to assist you in every step of the way and their rates are reasonable. With you calling the shots on relevancy, they can do most of the search work for you and still save your client’s money. If the matter is big and important enough, then, if I have a time opening, and it clears my firm’s conflicts, I can also be brought in for a full turn-key operation. Whether you want to include extra time for training your best experts is your option, but our preference.