Strengthening the argument for legal practitioners and the courts in Australia to be more open to the application of technology on our shores.
Recently, the English High Court in Pyrrho Investments v. MWB Property and the Irish Court of Appeal in Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Ltd v. Sean Quinn & Ors sanctioned the use of Predictive Coding (also known as Technology Assisted Review (TAR)).
The English High Court listed ten reasons why the technology was advantageous and found “no factors of any weight pointing in the opposite direction.”
This decision only strengthens the argument for legal practitioners and the courts in Australia to be more open to the application of this technology on our shores.
Of the 10 reasons cited by the English High Court, we have listed those which provide the most significant wins for legal teams and their clients below:
- “The cost of using predictive coding is proportionate to the value of the litigated claims”. The cost of manually reviewing huge sets of documents is enormous; technology can be utilised at a fraction of the cost.
- “Appropriate where a suitable alternative exists, and the cost of a manual review would be enormous and ‘unreasonable’”. Instead of spending months wading through documents, the majority of the review can be completed in a matter of weeks with the help of TAR.
- “Greater consistency in review approach”. Unlike a team of paralegals or junior lawyers manually reviewing documents, technology will produce consistent results every time.
The reluctance to trust technology to make the informed decisions that a trained lawyer would make seems to be a significant hurdle to get over for those considering the use of TAR. The best analogy for the application of this technology is to think of TAR as the student and the senior lawyers on a matter as teachers. Technology Assisted Review is only as good as the document analysis that it is given; it is the decisions of senior lawyers on a matter that teach the technology to make informed choices.
The end client benefits from the TAR approach as they receive top notch legal analysis applied to each and every document rather than the analysis of comparatively junior lawyers or paralegals and the courts/matter benefit from a swift outcome for discovery. The profession is encouraged to explore these benefits for their clients and for the industry.
If you are interested in finding out more about Technology Assisted Review please contact our team of consultants.