Pop Quiz: How Do Lawyers Use Machine Learning?
If you can use Google, you can use artificial intelligence on your next case.
If you’ve used Google to find a song with just a few words from a lyric or searched Netflix to pick out a comedy that’s safe to watch with kids, you have used applied machine learning. Machine learning is an area of artificial intelligence that enables computers to self-learn, without being explicitly programmed, to look for specific pieces of information.
When lawyers use machine learning for discovery or internal investigations, it’s commonly called technology assisted review (TAR) or predictive coding. Although TAR has been around for a while, lawyers and litigation support professionals still have questions about how to best use it on individual cases.
Are you ready to test your knowledge?
How would you answer 10 of the most common questions about TAR?
- What are the thresholds for using TAR?
- How can you prove a negative—that a document doesn’t exist?
- Should you use randomly selected documents to train the system?
- How does TAR handle ‘bad’ decisions by reviewers?
- If you are halfway through review, can you switch to TAR?
- Is there a fail-safe to prevent a party from skewing results?
- Can you add docs once you’ve started a TAR project?
- How can TAR help find what you don’t know?
- How do you know when to stop the review?
- How much time and money would TAR save on a review?
How did you do on the quiz?
How many of the questions were you able to answer confidently? The truth is, some of these questions are susceptible to multiple answers and approaches. That’s why Catalyst, an e-discovery company that specializes in search technology, compiled a book with detailed answers to questions that its experts receive about TAR.
The book, Ask Catalyst: A User’s Guide to TAR, is available for free at this link. It offers detailed answers to 20 basic and advanced questions about TAR, and particularly about advanced TAR 2.0 using continuous active learning. A User’s Guide is Catalyst’s second book about TAR. The first book, TAR for Smart People, is an in-depth look at how TAR works and why it matters for legal professionals. It’s also available via a free download here.
