Proportionality, Not Perfection, Is What Matters

By John Rosenthal and Jason Moore (November 2, 2017, 11:34 AM EDT) -- Recently, a handful of jurists and commentators[1] have caused a stir in the e-discovery community by trying to resurrect[2] the argument that litigants should avoid using search terms (aka "keyword searches" or "keyword filtering") to filter or cull a document population before employing a predictive coding engine for responsiveness determinations. The gist of their argument is that using search terms to reduce a document population necessarily results in relevant documents being excluded from the review population, thereby reducing the overall accuracy of the review effort in the interest of efficiency. While there is much to be said about the technical merits of such an argument, the most important point that we can raise is a philosophical one: So what?...

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