From time to time I like read poetry. Lately it has been the poetry of Billy Collins, a neighbor and famous friend. (He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.) I have been reading his latest book recently, The Rain in Portugal. Billy’s comedic touches balance the heavy parts. Brilliant poet. I selected one poem from this book to write about here, The Five Spot, 1964. It has a couple of obvious e-discovery parallels. It also mentions a musician I had never heard of before, Roland Kirk, who was a genius at musical multi-tasking. Enjoy the poem and videos that follow. There is even a lesson here on e-discovery.
There’s always a lesson to be learned
whether in a hotel bar
or over tea in a teahouse,
no matter which way it goes,
for you or against,
what you want to hear or what you don’t.Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,
with two then three saxophones
in his mouth at once
and a kazoo, no less,
hanging from his neck at the ready.
Even in my youth I saw this
not as a lesson in keeping busy
with one thing or another,
but as a joyous impossible lesson
in how to do it all at once,pleasing and displeasing yourself
with harmony here and discord there.
But what else did I know
as the waitress lit the candle
on my round table in the dark?
What did I know about anything?Billy Collins
The famous musician in this poem is Rahsaan Roland Kirk (August 7, 1935[2] – December 5, 1977). Kirk was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality, during which virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and, as mentioned, the astounding ability to simultaneously play several musical instruments.
Here is a video of Roland Kirk with his intense multimodal approach to music.
One more Kirk video. What a character.
____
The Law
There are a few statements in Billy Collins’ Five Spot poem that have obvious applications to legal discovery, such as “There’s always a lesson to be learned … no matter which way it goes, for you or against, what you want to hear or what you don’t.” We are all trained to follow the facts, the trails, wherever they may lead, pro or con.
I do not say either pro or con “my case” because it is not. It is my client’s case. Clients pay lawyers for their knowledge, skill and independent advice. Although lawyers like to hear evidence that supports their client’s positions and recollections, after all it makes their job easier, they also want to hear evidence that goes against their client. They want to hear all sides of a story and understand what it means. They look at everything to craft a reasonable story for judge and jury.
Almost all cases have good and bad evidence on both sides. There is usually some merit to each side’s positions. Experienced lawyers look for the truth and present it in the best light favorable for their client. The Rules of Procedure and duties to the court and client require this too.
Bottom line for all e-discovery professionals is that you learn the lessons taught by the parties notes and documents, all of the lessons, good and bad.
The poem calls this a “… joyous impossible lesson in how to do it all at once, pleasing and displeasing yourself with harmony here and discord there.” All lawyers know this place, this joyless lesson of discovering the holes in your client’s case. As far as the “doing it all at once ” phrase, this too is very familiar to any e-discovery professional. If it is done right, at the beginning of a case, the activity is fast and furious. Kind of like a Roland Kirk solo, but without Roland’s exuberance.
Everybody knows that the many tasks of e-discovery must be done quickly and pretty much all at once at the beginning of a case: preservation notices, witness interviews, ESI collection, processing and review. The list goes on and on. Yet, in spite of this knowledge, most everyone still treats e-discovery as if they had bags of time to do it. Which brings me to another Billy Collins poem that I like:
BAGS OF TIME
When the keeper of the inn
where we stayed in the Outer Hebrides
said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,
which we would reach by traversing the causeway
between this island and the one to the north,I started wondering what a bag of time
might look like and how much one could hold.
Apparently, more than enough time for me
to wonder about such things,
I heard someone shouting from the back of my head.Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,
at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,
and I was still thinking about the bags of time
as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway
then down into the hold for the vehicles.Yet it wasn’t until I stood at the railing
of the upper deck with a view of the harbor
that I decided that a bag of time
should be the same color as the pale blue
hull of the lone sailboat anchored there.And then we were in motion, drawing back
from the pier and turning toward the sea
as ferries had done for many bags of time,
I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,
who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,and usually on schedule, he added,
unless the weather has something to say about it.
Conclusion
Take time out to relax and let yourself ponder the works of a poet. We have bags of time in our life for that. Poetry is liable to make you a better person and a better lawyer.
I leave you with two videos of poetry readings by Billy Collins, the first at the Obama White House. He is by far my favorite contemporary poet. Look for some of his poems on dogs and cats. They are especially good for any pet lovers like me.
One More Billy Collins video.
Posted by Ralph Losey 
The 
he key is to know how to use the document review search tools that are now available to find the targeted information. We have been working on various methods of use since our case before Judge Andrew Peck in Da Silva Moore in 2012. After we helped get the first judicial approval of predictive coding in Da Silva, we began a series of several hundred document reviews, both in legal practice and scientific experiments. We have now refined our method many times to attain optimal efficiency and effectiveness. We call our latest method Hybrid Multimodal IST Predictive Coding 4.0. 
The TAR Course is now composed of eighteen classes:
With a lot of hard work you can complete this online training program in a long weekend, but most people take a few weeks. After that, this course can serve as a solid reference to consult during complex document review projects. It can also serve as a launchpad for real Knowledge and eventually some Wisdom into electronic document review. TARcourse.com is designed to provide you with the Information needed to start this path to AI enhanced evidence detection and production.
Many lawyers and technologists like predictive coding and recommend it to their colleagues. They have good reasons. It has worked for them. It has allowed them to do e-discovery reviews in an effective, cost efficient manner, especially the big projects. That is true for me too, but that is not why I love predictive coding. My feelings come from the excitement, fun, and amazement that often arise from seeing it in action, first hand. I love watching the predictive coding features in my software find documents that I could never have found on my own. I love the way the AI in the software helps me to do the impossible. I really love how it makes me far smarter and skilled than I really am.
I have been getting those kinds of positive feelings consistently by using the latest 
Bottom line for us from this research was to prove and improve our methods. Our latest version 4.0 of Predictive Coding, Hybrid Multimodal IST Method is the result. We have even open-sourced this method, well most of it, and teach it in a free seventeen-class online program: 
Steps Four, Five and Six of the standard eight-step workflow for Predictive Coding 4.0 is where we work with the active machine-learning features of Mr. EDR. These are its predictive coding features, a type of artificial intelligence. We train the computer on our conception of relevance by showing it relevant and irrelevant documents that we have found. The software is designed to then go out and find all other relevant documents in the total dataset. One of the skills we learn is when we have taught enough and can stop the training and complete the document review. At TREC we call that the Stop decision. It is important to keep down the costs of document review.
After a while Mr. EDR starts to “get it,” he starts to really understand what we are after, what we think is relevant in the case. That is when a happy shock and awe type moment can happen. That is when Mr. EDR’s intelligence and search abilities start to exceed our own. Yes. It happens. The pupil then starts to evolve beyond his teachers. The smart algorithms start to see patterns and find evidence invisible to us. At that point we sometimes even let him train himself by automatically accepting his top-ranked predicted relevant documents without even looking at them. Our main role then is to determine a good range for the automatic acceptance and do some spot-checking. We are, in effect, allowing Mr. EDR to take over the review. Oh what a feeling to then watch what happens, to see him keep finding new relevant documents and keep getting smarter and smarter by his own self-programming. That is the special AI-high that makes it so much fun to work with Predictive Coding 4.0 and Mr. EDR.
Using traditional linear review methods it would have taken us 45 years to review that many documents! Instead, we did it in 45 days. Plus our recall and precision rates were insanely good. We even scored 100% precision and 100% recall in one TREC project in 2015 and two more in 2016. You read that right. Perfection. Many of our other projects attained scores in the high and mid nineties. We are not saying you will get results like that. Every project is different, and some are much more difficult than others. But we are saying that this kind of AI-enhanced review is not only fast and efficient, it is effective.
This was a very frustrating situation at first, but, and here is the cool thing, even though we did not know, Mr. EDR knew. That’s right. He saw the TREC patterns of relevance hidden to us mere mortals. In many of the thirty Topics we would just sit back and let him do all of the driving, like a Google car. We would often just cheer him on (and each other) as the TREC systems kept saying Mr. EDR was right, the documents he selected were relevant. The truth is, during much of the 45 days of TREC we were like kids in a candy store having a great time. That is when we decided to give Mr. EDR a cape and superhero status. He never let us down. It is a great feeling to create an AI with greater intelligence than your own and then see it augment and improve your legal work. It is truly a hybrid human-machine partnership at its best.
Mr. EDR, and other good predictive coding software like it, can augment our own abilities and make us incredibly productive. This is why I love predictive coding and would not trade it for any other legal activity I have ever done (although I have had similar highs from oral arguments that went great, or the rush that comes from winning a big case).
One note of caution: most e-discovery vendors, including the largest, do not have active machine learning features built into their document review software. Even the few that have active machine learning do not necessarily follow the Hybrid Multimodal IST Predictive Coding 4.0 approach that we used to attain these results. They instead rely entirely on machine-selected documents for training, or even worse, rely entirely on random selected documents to train the software, or have elaborate unnecessary secret control sets.
Love what you do. It is a great feeling and sure fire way to job satisfaction and success. With these new predictive coding technologies it is easier than ever to love e-discovery. Try them out. Treat yourself to the AI high that comes from using smart machine learning software and fast computers. There is nothing else like it. If you switch to the 4.0 methods and software, you too can know that thrill. You can watch an advanced intelligence, which you helped create, exceed your own abilities, exceed anyone’s abilities. You can sit back and watch Mr. EDR complete your search for you. You can watch him do so in record time and with record results. It is amazing to see good software find documents that you know you would never have found on your own.
Every judge who has ever struggled with discovery issues wishes that the lawyers involved had a better understanding of proportionality, that they had spent more time really thinking about how it applies to the requisites of their case. So too does every lawyer who, like me, specializes in electronic discovery. As Chief Justice Roberts explained in his 
Proportionality is key to all discovery, to knowing the appropriate size and shape of discovery requests in order to fit the requisites of a case. Reading the rules that embody the doctrine of proportionality is a good start, but just a start. The primary rule to understand is how proportionality effects the scope of relevance as set forth in 
Reading the key cases is also a help, indispensable really, but reading what the judges say is not enough either. Still you need to keep up with the fast growing case law on proportionality. See for instance the fine collection by K&L Gates at: 
Proportionality is one of those deep subjects where you should think for yourself, but also be open and listen to others. It is possible to do both, although not easy. It is one of those human tricks that will make us hard to replace by smart machines. The game I have created will help you with that. Try out the 
Ralph has long been a leader of the world's tech lawyers. He has presented at hundreds of legal conferences and CLEs around the world. Ralph has written over two million words on e-discovery and tech-law subjects, including seven books. He is also the founder of 
Ralph is a specialist who has limited his legal practice to electronic discovery and tech law since 2006. He has a special interest in software and the search and review of electronic evidence using 
