Technology Empowers Legal Review Teams and Increases Document Review Efficiency

In his recent New York Times article, John Markoff highlights how “advances in artificial intelligence,” (ediscovery software in particular) have created a shift in the way law firms and corporations conduct legal discovery. While Mr. Markoff agrees that technology provides greater efficiencies and cost savings in document review, he claims that a heavier reliance on technology will ultimately result in a decreased demand for lawyers. While we agree that litigants are relying more heavily on technology during discovery, the suggestion that this will have negative repercussions for the practice of law is misguided.

Document review is, by far, the most expensive part of the legal discovery process. Today, for every $1 spent on processing data, $3 or more is spent on document review. This disparity makes traditional document review economically impractical and counter to notions of proportionality and reasonableness. Furthermore, recent court decisions and learned commentary from reputable organizations such as The Sedona Conference® have opened the door for technology to bring efficiencies to the costly practice of document review.

Kroll Ontrack has a long history of developing groundbreaking technology solutions calculated to make the discovery process less expensive and more efficient. These innovations include advanced search technologies, multilingual character recognition and early data assessment. Most recently, Intelligent Review Technology (IRT), which integrates smart technology with legal expertise, has been developed and implemented in the award-winning Ontrack® Inview™ document review tool. IRT expedites document review decisions by prioritizing and suggesting categories for yet-to-be-reviewed documents. IRT learns from lawyers while they work, strengthens the defensibility of document production decisions and ultimately empowers attorneys to focus on what they do best – devising case strategy and making tactical decisions. Most importantly, studies show that this powerful technology can reduce the expense of document review by more than 50 percent.

“Litigants and their counsel are relentlessly pursuing more efficient, cost-effective legal discovery processes,” said George May, vice president of product strategy, Kroll Ontrack. “It’s inevitable that reliance on technology will continue to increase as clients strive to reduce the total cost of litigation.”