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.