It’s now common that a case involves more documents than attorneys can lay eyes on, or should lay eyes on—for cost, time, or other reasons. If you cannot or should not look at every single document but still need to be confident all of the important documents have been found, Technology Assisted Review, or TAR, is a large part of the solution. In this first of a two-part presentation, I will explore why you should use TAR, what it is and how to use it. Part 2 will cover the judicial acceptance of TAR, additional uses of TAR and some best practice considerations.

Two of the best reasons to use TAR are (1) the cost associated with linear review; and (2) that it’s more accurate than using search terms in identifying relevant documents. First, linear review, which is a document by document review of a certain set of documents, is extremely expensive. A common industry benchmark is a document review rate of 40-50 documents per hour. If 100,000 documents need review, it could take 2,000 hours—a whole year’s worth of time! And, depending on the experience level of the people reviewing the documents, this could cost $200,000, $400,000 or even $600,000 for reviewers with an hourly rate of $100, $200 and $300, respectively. These numbers don’t really contemplate any QA/QC review, privilege review or second-pass review. No matter how you slice the numbers or what factors you build into an estimate, reviewing a lot of documents is expensive. TAR will allow you to review less documents, therefore reducing costs, and it will be more effective than other methods.