Electronic E-Discovery Software Replaces Lawyers
Autor: Roza Bestova • October 4, 2018 • Coursework • 362 Words (2 Pages) • 433 Views
SUMMARY TO THE CASE
Electronic E-Discovery Software Replaces Lawyers.
The discovery process which occurred about forty years ago, when there was case U.S. Justice Department vs CBS, lawyers and paralegals examined 6 million documents at a cost of $2.2 million. It was an overwhelming problem and carried huge cost till the present time. Nowadays, electronic discovery (e-discovery) software applications can examine documents in a fraction of the time at a very low cost.
Furthermore, it is worth to mention that some e-discovery applications go beyond just rapidly finding documents with relevant terms. It can extract relevant information in the absence of specific terms as well as deduce patterns of behavior that would have missed lawyers examining millions of documents.
Generally, e-discovery consist of two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological”. Linguistic software uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents and some of them can filter documents through a large number of interrelated word and phrase definitions. On the other hand, sociological applications add inferential analysis, closely resembling human reasoning. For example, software from Cataphora company investigates documents for information relating to the activities and interactions of people. The software then uses this information to visualize chains of events. Afterwards, it captures digital anomalies in which a person tries to hide a particular action. The Cataphora software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message.
Clearwell is another e-discovery company, that has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords. It uses language analysis in order to represent general concepts found in documents a visual way.
To conclude, e-discovery software is doing a tremendous job therefore the discovery process is becoming highly automated, scientific, and unbiased. One company used e-discovery software to reanalyze work that have been performed by company's lawyers between 1980s and 1990s. It revealed that lawyers had been only 60% accurate. The e-discovery software revolutionized the legal profession by not only cutting a cost as well as saving time for more important things. However, the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery will lead to a staff reduction because one lawyer can now do the work that once required hundreds of lawyers.
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