While prognosticating information governance and eDiscovery trends last month, the eDJ Group asserted that 2012 would be the year that technology-assisted review and predictive coding really take off. Companies obviously need to address and reduce high legal review costs. It is also critical to dramatically increase review capacity given the growth in information volumes while improving the accuracy and quality of review. There is anecdotal evidence of technology-assisted review methods like predictive coding gaining traction, but there was not great data on actual usage rates or plans. eDJ Group began running a survey on the topic earlier this month (you can take the survey here), and early data returns show that 2012 is indeed the year that technology-assisted review for more automated review processes will take off.
What technology-assisted review techniques like predictive coding do is use a mix of people and technology to automatically mark documents in a case corpus as either privileged, responsive, or both. Actual predictive coding methodology has been in practice for decades outside of the legal industry (e.g. Pandora’s music service is really a predictive coding methodology). The legal market has been slower to adopt some technology-assisted review methodologies en masse because this market, in particular, tends to be more conservative about adopting new techniques. Many prefer to wait for rules or precedents to be set before buying in to these technology-assisted approaches. eDJ Group asked survey respondents if they have used or are using predictive coding at present. While the survey has only been live for a week, early results confirm our hypothesis that adoption is still fairly low – only one-third of respondents have used or are using predictive coding.