United Kingdom Journals

The author explains the current and potential role of technology assisted review and document disclosure in English High Court litigation.

In complex litigation it is now not unusual for there to be millions of documents which need to be assessed for relevance to the issues prior to disclosure being given to the other party. However human beings, including experienced lawyers, are not good at reaching consistent decisions as to whether individual documents are or are not relevant to the issues in a case. Computers on the other hand are now able to analyse vast numbers of documents very quickly in order to identify the probability of each document being relevant to the issues in the case, based on a comparison between on the one hand the contents of the document and on the other hand a sample set of documents which an expert review has classified as being relevant or irrelevant to the issues. The computer can be relied on to reach consistent decisions over a very large pool of documents, and to work continuously without being interrupted or getting bored. There are potentially very considerable savings to be made by using computers in this way.

Index words: England and Wales; civil proceedings; electronic disclosure; technology assisted review