I saw an interesting blog post by James Taylor, Decision Management in the New York Times, commenting on a New York Times article, Smarter than you think, on e-discovery and the use of computers rather than hordes of lawyers. James notes that the focus of the article was on the reduction in staff to examine documents by shifting some of the work to computers through text analytics. He added that this fails to account the massive growth in documents and data available in these cases.
Without new tools, e-discovery could have been headed for what he called the “telephone operator event horizon. “ In other words there might be a point when e-discovery employed everyone because of the massive expansion in documents being processed. James said this is named after the famous prediction that expansion in telephone service would mean that half the population had to become a telephone operator – a prediction overtaken by the automated telephone exchange.
He goes on to conclude that, “automation of decisions sometimes reduces the need for staff. Much more often it innovates and allows companies to apply the same staff to more problems by replacing boring, mechanical work with more interesting, more difficult work that is hard to automate or where automation is not desirable.”
Text analytics can reduce the amount of content for a person to scan by ruling our certain irrelevant documents and bringing forward those with relevant content. I have reviewed a number of the e-discovery vendors and they do provide a useful service and can greatly reduce both tedious work and legal expenses. The New York Times article quoted lawyer Bill Herr about the tedious nature of the discovery process, “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t,”
However, in the end a person needs to be involved. In this instance, it is a legal expert familiar with the case. What can we do to allow this expert to make better use of his cognitive capabilities? This is where the Darwin Awareness Engine™ takes a different approach. Rather than trying to get the computer to understand meaning within content, if creates visualizations to allow people to more efficiently and effectively sort through it. Automation based on Chaos Theory takes on the content aggregation and sorting process as the top 100 themes within a set of content is displayed in a manner that allows for easy sorting and investigation. This could be a natural complement to the use of text analytics to narrow the content for analysis. Once narrowed, now a person can best use their cognitive capabilities to know what to look for and where to look next. Here is more on the Awareness Engine.
I have been reading James Taylor's Blog for sometime and some great articles .. Just found your site and have already put it on my bookmarks..But on the topic... automation of decisions is great in some things but I would have the feeling that lawyers would rely too much on this tool for research and may miss somethings.. I see it as a viable product in other areas but not when playing with human lives.. Just my 2 cents.
Posted by: CRM | May 09, 2011 at 07:26 AM