Article Title

Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review

Authors

Maura R. Grossman
Gordon V. Cormack

Abstract

E-discovery processes that use automated tools to prioritize and select documents for review are typically regarded as potential cost-savers – but inferior alternatives – to exhaustive manual review, in which a cadre of reviewers assesses every document for responsiveness to a production request, and for privilege. This Article offers evidence that such technology-assisted processes, while indeed more efficient, can also yield results superior to those of exhaustive manual review, as measured by recall and precision, as well as F1, a summary measure combining both recall and precision. The evidence derives from an analysis of data collected from the TREC 2009 Legal Track Interactive Task, and shows that, at TREC 2009, technology-assisted review processes enabled two participating teams to achieve results superior to those that could have been achieved through a manual review of the entire document collection by the official TREC assessors.

Recommended Citation

Maura R. Grossman & Gordon V. Cormack, Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, 17 Rich. J.L. & Tech 11 (2011).
Available at: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/jolt/vol17/iss3/5