Technology-Assisted Review Makes Main Street

In our last article, we wrote about various analytics tools available in software platforms for legal document review. One tool we identified is technology-assisted review (also known as “TAR” or “predictive coding”). Six or seven years ago litigants began using TAR with little assurance that courts would accept the methodology. Since then, numerous U.S. and international courts have accepted the use of TAR. In short, TAR is now considered mainstream.

The Process of Technology-Assisted Review

TAR is a review strategy that combines attorney review with computer algorithms to determine which documents are relevant for purposes of document production. This necessarily reduces the number of documents attorneys need to review. Each document review platform has its own method of TAR, but generally, there are two main types of assisted review: one where the documents are reviewed in rounds of sample documents until the system has been appropriately trained, and another type called “continuous active learning” where the system is trained as it goes with each new document reviewed.