AI-Powered Document Review: How CAL Can Speed Up Your Next Case | Article

Unlocking Faster, More Accurate Reviews

According to eDiscovery Today’s 2023 State of the Industry Report, many litigation teams still struggle to deploy technology-assisted review (TAR). Reasons include lack of understanding of how machine learning technologies work; resistance to changing their workflows; limited transparency; and unfamiliarity of types of cases for which TAR is best suited.

Continuous active learning (CAL), is an iterative form of TAR, also known as TAR 2.0, that uses human decisions about documents to find the most relevant ones. UnitedLex deploys RAPID Review as a risk-free form of CAL with a fixed fee to train the AI model eliminating eyes-on-review of all documents. Following secondary review processes UnitedLex provides a 98% quality guarantee on production sets. RAPID Review is a good fit for matters in which cost and efficiency gains are a priority for the law firm and client, and production risk is minimal.

Most, if not all, cases can benefit from CAL, though it still is elusive as a standard tool. How can litigation teams become more comfortable in using CAL? In this article, we provide a brief overview of guidance from the courts, along with authoritative bodies such as the ABA and The Sedona Conference. Then we turn to common use cases—including the types of cases—that are an ideal fit for RAPID Review, a fixed-fee, risk-free way to try CAL workflows.

Guidance from the Courts: In 2012, former New York Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck, in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, issued the first ruling to approve the use of TAR as an “acceptable way to search for relevant ESI in appropriate cases.” Three years later in In Rio Tinto PLC v. Vale S.A., the court observed that “the case law has developed to the point that it is now black letter law that where the producing party wants to utilize TAR for document review, courts will permit it.” Since then, there have been more than 85 cases in which the approval of TAR has extended internationally, where instructions and protocols have been established regarding its use, and where courts ruled on disputes regarding TAR approaches (including requiring the use of TAR).

Sedona Conference: In May 2023, The Sedona Conference published its TAR Case Law Primer, Second Edition, to further address the development of TAR case law, judicial decisions, and how the technological shift from earlier TAR 1.0 systems to TAR based on continuous active learning (TAR 2.0) has furthered case law. The primer offers litigation teams insights into continuous active learning (CAL) workflow considerations, validation, proportionality and fee shifting issues, and use of TAR in government investigations.

ABA Model Rules: Consistent with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers must recognize the emerging use and rapid evolution of AI products, including TAR, its advantages and benefits, and potential issues—including ethical considerations[1]–involved in using (and not using) AI. (ABA Model Rule 1.1 cmt 8. specifically requires attorneys to stay “abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology”).

Consistent with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, ABA Resolution 604 was adopted unanimously at the ABA’s February 2023 Midyear Meeting. The guidelines are intended to enhance AI, reduce its inherent risks, and facilitate the development and use of AI in a trustworthy and responsible manner by urging organizations that design, develop, deploy, and use AI systems (such as TAR) to focus on ensuring accountability and transparency in AI applications.

What is RAPID Review and Why Should Legal Teams Care?

Launched from the UnitedLex Innovation Lab, RAPID Review is a fixed-fee, risk-free way to try optimized CAL workflows led and managed by UnitedLex experts. Our unique approach uses CAL workflows in Relativity workspaces to eliminate first pass review altogether, while delivering total project transparency and defensibility.

Like all CAL models, a human reviewer tags a document as relevant or non-relevant, then the AI model takes the human input and uses it to draw inferences about other yet unseen documents, and then ranks them by the likelihood of relevance, queuing them up for the review team. This process continues until the search objective is reached and the review is finished, determined by humans on where to draw the cutoff, if any, and how many documents need to be reviewed.

RAPID Review provides a fixed-fee, risk-free way to deliver an optimized CAL review:

20-30% faster than off-the-shelf CAL and other assisted review methods;
75% faster than manual review; and
Up to 66% in review savings.

Coverage queue: By focusing on the middle tranches of documents in which relevancy is not clear, we review the set deemed maximally impactful if coded for responsiveness (typically anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 documents). These are the documents that rank (train) the system.

The RAPID Review coverage queue is the most efficient method to determine and validate the cutoff rank (responsive versus non-responsive) as opposed to coding through all responsive documents during first pass review to determine cutoff, enabling the client to put eyes on protection hits (privilege and sensitive documents such as HIPAA and PII) only.

Secondary review processes: Another benefit of the full RAPID Review process is that secondary review workflows can be handled by the UnitedLex team using our proprietary Shield Series made up of three layers:

Privilege review accelerators with PrivShield Protection: During privilege review, UnitedLex reviewers draw on a library of 4,700-plus privilege terms—far more than generally accepted privilege term lists used by other service providers—for a faster and more accurate (measured by precision) privilege review enabling a 30% reduction in privilege review workflows.
Enhanced sensitive data identification and redaction with RedactShield Protection: By using our proprietary data mining technology, we can identify and extract more than 500 terms and patterns at processing to identify and redact sensitive content, providing more comprehensive and accurate results.
Guaranteed Production Quality with ProdShield Protection: Comprised of validated quality assurance and quality control checks resulting in a 98% quality guarantee.

Benefits of RAPID Review

The combination of the RAPID Review layer and secondary processes enables the client to optimize efficiency and costs, and better meet rolling production deadlines. Added benefits include:

Ranks can be updated in real-time during RAPID Review allowing an early start on Shield Series workflows for immediate production(s) (e.g., produce highest rank responsive documents that do not hit on Priv/Redact Shield criteria in days, not weeks or months).
Responsive documents can similarly be prioritized during Shield Series review to accelerate identification of previously unknown privilege creators/breakers resulting in higher overall accuracy on manually reviewed, producible documents.
Through Shield Series we ensure secondary touches are performed by specialized reviewers specifically trained in their respective workflows—not relying on a first pass review to identify all relevant components, resulting in higher accuracy and efficiency.
Structured analytics ensure consistency across all duplicates, near duplicates, and email threads, which are all validated prior to production.

The UnitedLex team can also apply RAPID PrivLog, our privilege logging Generative AI-powered internal workflow accelerator, to automate privilege log descriptions, increasing consistency and accuracy while reducing timelines by 40% and costs by 25% compared to manual logging using industry-standard review platforms.

RAPID Report: Following the review, our RAPID Report delivers transparency into process and results, defensibility, and cost-saving metrics over alternative review methods.

The result is faster access to your complete responsive corpus, with issue codes and a 98% quality guarantee for privilege, PXI and redaction, for a faster path to production.

RAPID Review Best Use Cases

RAPID Review in particular is a good fit for matters in which cost and efficiency gains are a priority and production risk is minimal.

Second Requests: These requests for production are an added information-gathering tool when the FTC and DOJ investigate proposed transactions above a certain threshold level that have the potential to be anticompetitive. The agencies often issue expansive and all-encompassing requests within short deadlines (often 30 days), making Second Requests hugely expensive, time-consuming, and stressful. RAPID Review is an ideal approach due to the large volumes of documents needing review, coupled with condensed timelines and minimal production risk, as documents are not provided to third parties.
Opposing Party Reviews: In opposing party reviews, document productions are provided by opposing counsel during the course of a litigation. Documents are presumed to be responsive and non-privileged. RAPID Review is an ideal fit because documents are already produced and can be voluminous. It’s a cost-effective way to surface the most relevant data from the opposing party to support your litigation strategy.
Third Party Subpoenas: A third-party subpoena is a procedural mechanism, ordered by the court, which allows parties in litigation to obtain potential evidence from a non-party. The subpoena requires the third party to produce documents. Typically, when faced with a third-party subpoena, non-parties look to minimize cost and balance risk while performing their production obligations. RAPID Review provides a process for efficiently and cost-effectively providing data to comply with these requests.
Investigations: When an organization becomes aware of a potential wrongdoing to determine the validity of such claims, they must investigate prior to any active litigation. In all investigations—whether promulgated by the government, regulatory bodies, or internal suspicions of wrongdoing—time and budget are always the enemy. Investigators are often subject to tight budgets and limited resources. RAPID Review helps investigators prioritize efforts by eliminating first pass review, allowing them to start with relevant documents for up to five unique coding calls to help determine whether to move forward with further action.

Our team has proven out the effectiveness and efficiency of RAPID Review over alternative methods—including straight CAL prioritized reviews—for certain types of matters. For example, for a Fortune 200 financial services company facing a Second Request, RAPID Review saved the company $3.5 million over alternative review methods, eliminated 3 million documents from eyes on review, saving 60,000 first pass review hours, and defensibly produced 900,000 documents without review—while meeting DOJ requirements.

Common Applications of Continuous Active Learning

Whether RAPID Review is a good fit for your next matter or not, CAL workflows are an excellent choice to efficiently work through your document review. CAL can be applied for many review and knowledge protection tasks including:

Prioritized queue: Provides risk-balanced work allocation prioritizing relevant documents first for human review, setting aside those deemed less likely to be relevant for lower cost (e.g., offshore) review or, through coverage/cutoff queue, to eliminate documents altogether.
Prioritized quality control (QC): Provides a machine learning-generated opinion about a document coding to double-check against human review decisions, flagging coding discrepancies and inconsistencies.
Concurrent workflows: Uses CAL models to support secondary workflows such as categorization for issue codes, privilege determinations, and redaction applications.
Coverage/cutoff queue: Validates the CAL model with document rank distribution and elusion testing to eliminate documents from review.

RAPID Review introduces an innovative CAL workflow to eliminate eyes-on review of relevant documents. Whether you have one of the use cases discussed above or any other legal matter, UnitedLex will help to inform your process, choose the right approach to CAL, and manage the review in close collaboration with outside counsel and the company.