e-Discovery and Artificial Intelligence

Ahead of the latest episode in the Boyes Turner tech podcast series, Prof J.Mark Bishop shares his thoughts on'e-Discovery and Artificial Intelligence... Events unfold and you are dropped into the opening of a long and complex case with 500,000 emails to sift through and you're not even sure what you are looking for, who you are looking for, or when any incidents of interest may have occurred. Currently the review of documents is the most labour-intensive task of an e-discovery investigation often consuming more than 75% of the project budget. This is largely because researchers review the documents manually. To put this into context, to review half a million documents by hand, at 25 documents an hour, would take around 20,000 person-hours. Hence, because it is practically impossible to review all documents in the target corpus by hand, results are too often limited by simple keyword searches. Unfortunately coming up with responsive keywords is not trivial as a researcher often does not know exactly what she is looking for beforehand.