Last year, Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued the first judicial opinion recognizing predictive coding, also known as technology-assisted review, as a legitimate e-discovery tool. Since that opinion, the focus of the e-discovery world has been on predictive coding, seen by many as a more accurate way to identify relevant electronically stored information (ESI) for discovery than the predecessor technology, keyword searching. Other federal and state courts have followed Peck’s lead.
However, the cost effectiveness of an ESI production plan can vary considerably depending on such factors as the importance of the issues, size of dataset and resources of the parties. Specifically, keyword searching can be substantially less costly than predictive coding. And three recent cases demonstrate that keyword searching remains a defensible e-discovery plan.
