Predictive Coding Slowly Becoming the Norm

TGC survey results indicate that recognition of the risks posed by social media is widespread, but procedures for dealing with it are lagging. About three-quarters of respondents said their company had a policy for employee use of social media, but just over half had procedures for collecting and preserving in the event of an information request.

According to Deborah Baron, CEO at Nuix NA, social media is to e-discovery today what email was before 2006 – viewed as a quagmire of unknown cost and risk.

Leonard Deutchman, general counsel and vice-president of LDiscovery, LLC, points out that social media does not lend itself to collection and preservation as naturally as emails and e-docs. Because the data is on the provider’s site, it is not easy to preserve. Typically, a digital forensics expert is brought in for the task, which means out of pocket expense.

Only 27 percent of survey respondents reported that their organizations had adopted predictive coding software, but there is a clear trend for larger departments to make use of that technology with greater frequency than medium or small departments.

Slow adoption may reflect the fact that the technique requires significant time on the part of one or more senior attorneys to “teach” the case to the computer.

The survey showed a clear trend of legal department responsibility for most aspects of the e-discovery process, including cost and risk analysis, culling and analysis, and review and production.