Lawyers and bankers are the professionals everyone loves to hate on. Shakespeare’s line from Henry VI captures this sentiment in a strong but clear way: ”The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Soon, that dream, albeit it being hypothetical, may come true, and machines will be the ones to do it. Forty percent of more than 100 in-house attorneys in major American corporations told the industry publication Corporate Counsel, in a survey published on Jan. 23, that they rely on technology assisted review (TAR).
Academically trained attorneys are increasingly being replaced by technology to analyze evidence and assess it for relevance in investigations, lawsuits, compliance efforts, and more. Law firms and corporate counsel now often hire electronic discovery companies who manage these sorts of computerized reviews, like Update Legal—formerly a staffing firm—and Epiq Systems.
“Overall, the myth that exhaustive manual review is the most effective—and therefore the most defensible—approach to document review is strongly refuted,” lawyers wrote in 2009 in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology.
“Technology-assisted review can (and does) yield more accurate results than exhaustive manual review, with much lower effort.” And of course, with much less money spent: their study found that TAR produced a 50-fold savings in cost over manual review.
In 2012, a federal judge in New York District Court, Andrew Peck, issued the first judicial opinion in the US endorsing the use of TAR in a pending case, Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, writing, “Computer-assisted review appears to be better than the available alternatives, and thus should be used in appropriate cases.”
Check out the whole article on the Word Economic Forums website.
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