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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Oliver Brown and Hayley Pizzey
Predictive coding (also known as technology-assisted review, or TAR) is computer software that can be trained to perform searches and assess relevance of ESI. At the outset, it is critical to understand that predictive coding is meant to enhance the efficiency of manual review, not replace human review entirely. In most reviews using predictive coding software, no document is disclosed without a lawyer reviewing it manually. The software instead performs an initial ranking of documents based on the likelihood the document will be relevant. In theory, then, the documents most likely to be relevant will be front-loaded; the review is meant to stop when the reviewers get to the group of documents deemed less likely to be relevant. This approach is at least theoretically a vast improvement to so-called “linear review,” in which reviewers simply looked at each document one by one without regard to the likely responsiveness of the document.