As humans, and particularly lawyers, we like to believe the work we do is of the utmost quality. However, besides being time-consuming and expensive, human linear review is consistently inaccurate. In one study, human beings only made the correct relevant/non-relevant call between 25%-75% of the time. For the “gold standard,” human linear review is significantly tarnished.
For those who use linear review, any effort to improve recall and precision is worthwhile. If not always achieving the highest quality, humans are forever striving for that goal. Those who realize they are at a disadvantage when up against the burdensome amount of electronic information being produced, have found that working hand in hand with better technology, such as Predictive Coding, gives them an advantage to push their quality higher.
Quality control for any document review is a crucial, but often overlooked, step. Putting to the side the ethical and professional requirements to do QC before producing documents to the other side in a litigation or to the government, it just makes sense to ensure that the people you have coding documents are doing a good job. This becomes more difficult, however, if you’ve outsourced the review to a third party, possibly even offshore.
A law firm recently has been accused of forgetting this lesson. J-M Manufacturing has accused McDermott Will & Emory of failing to supervise its contract attorneys, leading to the disclosure of supposedly privileged documents.
This is where Predictive Coding has unexpected benefits. In addition to improving the efficiency of the review, it increases the quality of the reviewers. Part of the low quality of human-only review comes from the constant drudgery of reviewing irrelevant document after irrelevant document. By showing the reviewer a higher percentage of relevant documents, the reviewer becomes more engaged, and more accurate.
Firms and companies cannot afford to ignore the QC step, whether it’s from Predictive Sampling or via a human-only quality control check. After all, quality is not just in the eye of the beholder, it’s a standard upheld in court.
