Predictive coding is a process where lawyers use technology to help identify documents within a collection that are relevant or privileged. The technology acts as a force-multiplier where the judgment of a senior attorney can be extrapolated to a larger document set using predictive coding technology. If done correctly, predictive coding can do a better job than eyes-on manual review. Like eyes-on manual review, predictive coding can do a poor job if the human judgment driving the predictive analytics is flawed.
The process itself isn’t that far off of an email spam filter. About 70 percent of email traffic in the world falls into the spam bucket, i.e., unsolicited commercial emails. Your spam filter learns how to automatically identify these garbage emails through human training. You have likely participated in the rough equivalent of predictive coding in training your spam filter—think of the “this is spam” button you may have clicked in the past.
