Kraftsow acknowledged that keyword search takes longer, and therefore can cost more, than predictive coding. But he said that's because predictive coding gives incomplete results. To get the same efficiency as a human reviewer's keyword search, a predictive coding process would need more time to configure the software than some users expect or than some vendors advertise, he asserted — leading to the same costs required by more traditional searches.
Something new, Kraftsow said, is that Austin, Texas-based Renew's software now includes a hybrid approach to proximity search, which evaluates information's relevance based on nearby words, and synonym search, which considers how words are related to each other. It also adds frequency search from highlighted sentences. The result, he said, is more efficiency without increasing the $350 average cost per gigabyte.
It's not that Kraftsow is against predictive coding, he explained. He's just fed up with the hype. "I'm an old guy and I kind of resent the nonsense that's going on that predictive coding is the only way to accelerate review [and] that they've got to turn the coding over to machines to get the cost-and-time savings that they want," he said. "It's just absurd, and it's wrong."
Evan Koblentz is a reporter for Law Technology News. Send email or follow him on Twitter.
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