The Basics of E-Discovery: Predictive Coding and AI
By Nancy Patton
What Is Predictive Coding?Predictive coding is a technology that assists document reviewers during the review phase of the EDRM. Typically it uses machine learning to label documents after the reviewers have completed some review, creating a “seed set” of coded (or labelled) documents. It improves the efficiency of human reviewers by understanding how they’ve labelled documents and then using those criteria to apply labels to documents that have not been reviewed yet.How Does Predictive Coding Differ from Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Artificial intelligence is an overarching term where the technology is doing... Read More
When you run a search for “CLOC," and especially if you toggle over to images, you likely aren't seeing anything related to legal operations. In fact, it looks a bit more like the picture to the right. But that's all about to change. Recently, CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) achieved a significant milestone in its maturation, and I was there to see it unfold as they hosted the first Annual Corporate Legal Operations Institute in San Francisco the first week of May. It was successfully organized and delivered by the CLOC... 
In my almost four years of working at Exterro and almost ten years in e-discovery overall, I have had many interesting, unexpected conversations with individuals in Legal and IT departments. Although I come from the legal side, I really do understand the landscape that IT is charged to take care of, which can be vast and complex especially for large organizations. Legal is charged with something relatively less complex; find the information that is being requested – nothing less and nothing more – that is responsive to the request and is... 
Here at Exterro, we recently closed a multi-year software licensing opportunity with a large city government. We began talking with them about their acquisition of e-discovery software in April of 2015, and from the very onset they kept saying, “Our goal is to have software implemented by December 1, 2015 when the amendments to the FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) take effect." But there's nothing in the amendments that state, “C ity governments must have e-discovery software solution up and running by December 1, 2015." So what was really driving... 
It was not terribly long ago that electronically stored information collection and subsequent review looked a lot like this: gather up printed emails, scan them into the system with optical character recognition (OCR) set to “on," and through a rudimentary set of search tools, try to find responsive content. Or, perhaps those “paper emails" showed up in a big binder and the task was to flip through one-by-one, classifying the item, its keywords, and potential relevance in an accompanying spreadsheet which would then be turned over to a supervising attorney. Believe... 
If you've been following my posts, you already know that I've chosen to focus this blog series on the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of the E-Discovery revolution. Over the past several months, the first three entries on “The Who" (part 1,part 2, part 3) have been completed. Now it's time to move onto “The What." In my roles as an implementation project manager on Exterro's client success team, and now as a member of the solutions consulting team, I've been involved in a lot of conversations regarding what we...