The past year’s most seminal article on technology-assisted review (commonly known as “automated document classification” or “predictive coding”) was Maura Grossman and Gordon Cormack’s law review piece, which effectively debunked the notion that manual review offers an unimpeachable gold standard. The authors succinctly summarized their statistically validated findings as follows:
This article offers evidence that . . . technology-assisted processes, while indeed more efficient, can also yield results superior to those of exhaustive manual review, as measured by recall and precision.
Maura R. Grossman & Gordon Cormack, Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective And More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, XVII Rich. J.L. & Tech 11 (2011). Anne Kershaw and Joe Howie agree. In a survey of 11 e-discovery vendors who use technology-assisted review in the form of predictive coding, they found not only that technology-assisted review outpaced their aptly termed “brute force [human] linear review of electronic data,” but also technologies that have been used in the not-so-distant past. They write: