Can High School Students Review E-Discovery Documents?

22 July 2012 – Just when document reviewers thought it could not get worse …

The E-Discovery Sage of Jackson Lewis (aka Ralph Losey) has an interesting post on the law.com site about information scientist William Webber who did an experiment involving first-pass legal review with a team of reviewers consisting of young high school students.  The results were incredible.  Although Webber has a number of caveats, the bottom line is the high schoolers did better than the professional reviewer lawyers.  To read the post click here.

And in case you have not been following the bandwidth on technology assisted review (TAR), you must.  Ralph is running a very detailed series (a “Predictive Coding Narrative” as he calls it).  But to get started and to put TAR in perspective read an excellent summary blog he recently posted … it has a scores of links for further understanding … by clicking here. 

You need to keep abreast of the ever-changing technology.  Because while it is unlikely that machines will fully replace the need for legal advocacy and analysis, even in document review, this role will change significantly.  It will require more expertise in the review technology used and less emphasis on managing a large group of reviewers.  By minimizing teams of human reviewers, the need for extensive quality control and assessment will be reduced.  Thus, the entire composition of a “review” team will evolve from a large staff of brute force reviewers to a small team of legally skilled, technologically savvy and statistically inclined attorneys.