P2P

50 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 Innovative firms are beginning to respond, even if it ultimately means changing the ways they think about providing legal services or finding new ways to cut back on their billable hours without sacrificing value. While doing less billable work for clients may seem counterintuitive, the truth is that smarter deployment of today's advanced technologies can generate more efficient and more accurate results, and it can produce better legal outcomes with fewer billable hours. Clients understand this, even as outside firms or service providers sometimes struggle to accept it. Clients who object to spending hundreds of hours to review documents simply because that's the way it's been done in the past are, indirectly, suggesting there must be a better way. But corporate clients are increasingly being more direct, particularly during the discovery phase, by explicitly asking firms and providers to be more innovative and deploy more advanced tools when appropriate. Whatever form these conversations with clients take, the focus is almost always on technology. Today's advanced tools make it possible for high-volume, complex work to be done faster and better. While firms leveraging these tools may not be able to bill as many hours for a particular matter, their clients benefit from the improved outcomes, and that leads to deeper, stronger, long-term relationships between attorneys and their clients. How Advanced Technology Improves Legal Collaboration Twenty years ago, if discovery involved thousands of documents, legal teams felt they had an ethical obligation to review every document within the scope of a request to identify potentially responsive documents and identify documents subject to privilege. But in today's world, discovery requests often involve millions of documents, which means the old approach is no longer practical or plausible. If the standard rate of review for a document reviewer is, say, 550 documents a day, it could take weeks or months to accomplish the task even with a large team. Today's advanced eDiscovery technology—including data culling technology, analytics, and AI-powered active learning—are changing that dynamic decisively. Organizations can transfer data much faster and more securely. They can quickly collect and process hundreds of different file types. With little or no human intervention, they can analyze unprecedented volumes of data, promptly culling duplicate and non-pertinent information. Most importantly, they can also begin identifying the most relevant data much earlier in the litigation process, in many cases by reviewing just a few hundred documents and training an algorithm to recognize what is potentially responsive. The algorithm "learns" over time with each new data set, ranking documents by relevance with increasing accuracy and presenting richer documents up front. This allows for a much faster review, and it also allows the legal team to get a better sense of the essential facts and the over-arching narrative early in the process. Even as discovery continues, firms and clients can begin sharing and discussing key evidence in real time. Inductive and Deductive Reasoning The ability to tease out a narrative thread from the very early stages of the discovery process is one of the most remarkable ways that AI and advanced analytics can contribute to more active and productive collaboration between legal teams and their clients. In the past, legal teams have tended to rely on deductive reasoning to build a case from the top down, looking at the complete body of evidence and then arriving at conclusions and developing persuasive arguments based on that evidence. Today's advanced eDiscovery technologies are shifting that paradigm, making it possible for legal teams to deploy inductive reasoning and processes to arrive at key facts F E A T U R E S

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