From New York Magazine's Daily Intel:
It's probably not exactly what Shakespeare had in mind, but new
technology is threatening to put New York's growing subclass of
mercenary drudge work lawyers out to pasture.
The Southern District of New York recently became the nation's first
federal court to explicitly approve the use of predictive coding, a
computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt
work currently done by underemployed attorneys over to the machines.
Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck endorsed a plan by the
parties in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe — a sex
discrimination case filed against the global communications agency by
five former employees — to use predictive coding to review more than 3
million electronic documents in order to determine whether they should
be produced in discovery, the process through which parties exchange
relevant information before trial.
The task of combing through mountains of emails, spreadsheets,
memos and other records in the discovery process currently falls on a
legion of "contract attorneys" who jump from one project to another,
employed by companies like Epiq Systems. Many are recent grads who are
unable to find full-time employment, or lawyers laid off during the
recent recession.
Scan. Point. Click. Repeat. That’s the job. Contract attorneys
are paid by the hour to sit in front of a computer and review a
mind-numbing sequence of uploaded documents. There are cramped,
sunless rooms in law firms throughout the city, with rows of computers
piled one on top of the other, and constant uncertainty as to how long
each particular stretch of employment will last....MORE
HT:
peHUB
