Draft Submitted for publication in PERSPECTIVES ON PREDICTIVE CODING AND OTHER ADVANCED SEARCH AND REVIEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE LEGAL PRACTITIONER (ABA 2015) A TOUR OF TECHNOLOGY-ASSISTED REVIEW

Since the publication of our 2011 article, Technology-Assisted Review In E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, in the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology (“JOLT article”), 1 the term “technology-assisted review” (“TAR”) – along with related terms such as “computer-assisted review” (“CAR”) and “predictive coding” (“PC”) – has been used extensively in writings, presentations, and legal documents to advance or assail a plethora of tools and methods aimed at decreasing the cost and burden associated with document review in electronic discovery (“eDiscovery”). The conflation of diverse tools and methods under a single label has resulted in confusion in the marketplace, and inapt generalizations regarding the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) and proper use of such tools and methods. In this chapter, we outline and illustrate – using a running example – the principal distinctions among the various tools and methods that we consider to be variants of TAR, and differentiate them from other tools and methods, such as “concept search,” “clustering,” “visualization,” and “social network analysis,” which we do not consider to be TAR. While eDiscovery tools fall on a continuum in terms of their utility for search, analysis, and review, we describe certain components that, in our opinion, are essential for a tool to be considered “technology-assisted review.”