Exploring AI in E-Discovery: How It Enhances Your Work

Understanding AI in the Context of E-Discovery
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term that dominates the news and media today. But what exactly is AI, and how can it assist with E-discovery requests and tasks? As a team who frequently engages in electronic discovery, we want to share how AI streamlines our daily tasks and identifies relevant information for litigation projects, potentially saving time, money, and resources.

What is AI? 
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. If it's "artificial," how does it actually work and assist in E-discovery? Wouldn't human reviewers, who can think and make decisions based on context, be better suited for this task? According to Techopedia, "Artificial intelligence is the development, deployment, and maintenance of computational systems that can replicate certain types of human intelligence." 

In E-discovery, AI often takes the form of machine learning models that have been around for some time. AI has been integral to E-discovery since around the year 2015, with applications like clustering, conceptual and sentiment analysis, email threading, and Technology Assisted Review (TAR) becoming more capable and commonplace. They use tools such as lexicons to define terms, knowledge engines to mimic thought processes, and much more. These models  analyze vast amounts of data to extract insights about concepts, emotions, and other elements that may be pertinent to legal matters and investigations. When these insights align with the relevant criteria set by attorneys/reviewers/E-Discovery specialists AI can drastically reduce the time required for human reviewers to manually sift through documents. Moreover, it eliminates the variability introduced by multiple human reviewers' opinions.

Getting Started with AI in E-Discovery
Now that we know AI can be beneficial, let's delve deeper into its application. Ensuring AI models return the most relevant documents largely depends on crafting well-written prompts. This might sound intimidating, but it’s quite straightforward. The key is to think of it as having a conversation with Generative AI using    concise and proper English.

Think back to your school days and the guidance from your English teachers—shout out to Mrs. Heritage! If you can write clear instructions and have a conversation, you can interact with Generative AI. Consider AI as a friend you’re meeting for lunch: you specify your preferences and expectations clearly. Similarly, when using AI, avoid jargon and repetitive phrasing. Instead, use your established review protocols as a foundation, then refine the prompts to pinpoint the key elements of your case.

Enhancing AI Effectiveness  in the E-Discovery
Our team uses Relativity’s AI tools (amongst others) to run sampling against a set of documents, allowing us and our clients to review the results quickly. If the initial results aren't satisfactory, you can refine your prompts to be clearer or more detailed – reports including statistics and correlation as well as iterative processes help complete these tasks. We start with  pre-collection review protocols, review outcomes, tweak the rational as needed, and build upon the results to identify key and relevant items.
 
AI can also be used for quality control purposes as part of your E-Discovery workflow, comparing its results against a traditional linear review to ensure accuracy and consistency. This Quality Control process adds an additional layer of validation for the E-Discovery process. One of the key advantages of AI in our day-to-day workflow is its ability to rapidly locate and surface important issues, case facts, codifications, hidden artifacts, and relevant information from vast data sets, enabling your team to quickly identify and focus on the most critical aspects of a matter.

Capsicum’s Approach to AI in E-Discovery
At Capsicum, we’re excited to share with you our successes with AI and how we believe it can assist you and your clients in managing the data and deadlines inherent in litigation tasks. AI isn't just a buzzword; it's a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can transform the E-discovery process.