Category Archives: eDiscovery

WTF is AI?

The term “artificial intelligence” (AI) is popping up everywhere from e-discovery to beer brewing. What do you think of when you hear it? Is it sexy and cutting-edge? This article explores what AI really is.

Virtually every computer program can be viewed as taking some input, applying some procedure, and generating some output. A program might take a number as input and output the square root of that number. It might take the history of moves so far in a chess game and output the optimal next move to give the best chance of wining the game. It may take a question voiced by a person as input and give an audible answer as output. What is special about a program that makes it count as AI?

One of the most iconic books on AI surveyed various attempts to define AI and categorized them in the figure below.

Russell & Norvig (2003). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall, p. 2.

Let’s focus on the bottom left quadrant of the figure where a program is considered to be AI if it acts like a human. The famous Turing Test would be an example of that. Would a computer program that computes square roots be considered AI under Kurzweil’s definition from the figure above? Do you know any unintelligent people that could compute the square root of an arbitrary number to several digits quickly? It seems like the program for computing square roots would qualify, though I doubt many people would intuitively peg it as AI. On the other hand, the definition by Rich and Knight from the same quadrant would not consider the square root calculator to be AI because the task is not one where humans currently beat computers. There isn’t agreement about what AI is within the same quadrant, let alone between different quadrants.

The definition by Rich and Knight touches on an important idea known as the AI effect, which says that once computers are good at doing a particular task, it’s not really considered AI anymore — it is then seen as “just a computation.” That means the things that are considered to be AI are always changing. Facial recognition is generally recognized as being AI today. It involves analyzing an image to determine which person is in it. The superficially similar process of analyzing an image to determine what text is in it, known as optical character recognition (OCR) and used heavily in e-discovery when scanned paper documents are encountered, was declared to no longer be considered to be AI by Roger Schank in a 1991 report because OCR worked too well to be interesting at that point.

With all of this ambiguity about what AI is, why are people so eager to slap the term on everything these days? Well, there have been some impressive and highly publicized accomplishments with cutting edge technologies recently and it can feel good to have a little of the hype rub off on you. Many of those accomplishments have been achieved with something called deep learning. The artificial neural network, which is a classifier that performs computations using a network structure that vaguely resembles the human brain, has been around for about 50 years but it didn’t work very well until some algorithms for effectively using a large number of layers, known as deep learning, were invented in 2006. Deep learning is able to accurately classify things even when the important relationships between the inputs are very complex as long as there is enough training data to nail down the parameters that describe all of that complexity.

In e-discovery we want to accurately classify documents as either responsive or non-responsive with as little human document review effort as possible. We often use a supervised machine learning process that is referred to as technology-assisted review (TAR) in this context. Little human effort means little training data, which is not optimal for deep learning. Additionally, it’s not clear that the task of classifying text documents involves the type of complexity where deep learning has a real advantage, so it is doubtful that deep learning would be beneficial compared to other classification algorithms for analyzing text documents in TAR (identifying objects in photos may be a more appropriate use). Technologies used for classification in TAR are typically simpler, older, and less computationally demanding than deep learning. For example, SVM (invented in 1963), logistic regression (roughly 1951), and kNN (1951) are often used. Of course, people in the e-discovery world have put a lot of effort into tuning the classifiers and their inputs to give good results for e-discovery in recent years, but the core classification algorithms are pretty old.

Labeling everything as AI gives the impression that it is similar to the highly successful (and complicated) deep learning stuff that is in the headlines, whereas in reality the algorithms used in many industries and contexts are much older and simpler.

Highlights from IG3 West 2019

IG3 West was held at the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Coast, California.  It consisted of one day of product demos followed by one day of talks.  The talks were divided into two simultaneous sessions throughout the day, so I could only attend half of them.  My notes below provide some highlights from the talks I attended.  You can find my full set of photos here.ig3west_2019_pool

Technology Solution Update from Corporate, Law Firm and Service Provider Perspective
How do we get the data out of the free version of Slack?  It is hard to get the data out of Office 365.  Employees are bringing in technologies such as Slack without going through the normal decision making process.  IT and legal don’t talk to each other enough.  When doing a pilot of legal hold software, don’t use it on a custodian that is on actual hold because something might go wrong.  Remember that others know much less than you, so explain things as if you were talking to a third grader.   Old infrastructure is a big problem.  Many systems haven’t really been tested since Y2K.  Business continuity should be a top priority.ig3west_2019_panel

Staying on Pointe: The Striking Similarities Between Ballet and eDiscovery
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Specialized eDiscovery: Rethinking the Notion of Relevancy
Does traditional ediscovery still work?  The traditional ways of communicating and creating data are shrinking.  WeChat and WhatsApp are now popular.  Prepare the client for litigation by helping the client find all sources of data and format the exotic data.  Requesting party may want native format (instead of PDF) to get the meta data, but keep in mind that you may have to pay for software to examine data that is in exotic formats.  Slack meta data is probably useless (there is no tool to analyze it).  Be careful about Ring doorbells and home security systems recording audio (e.g., recording a contractor working in your home) — recording audio is illegal in some areas if you haven’t provided notification to the person being recorded.  Chat, voice, and video are known problems.  Emoji’s with skins and legacy data are less-known problems.  Before you end up in litigation, make sure IT people are trained on where data is and how to produce it.  If you are going to delete data (e.g., to reduce risk of high ediscovery costs in the future), make sure you are consistent about it (e.g., delete all emails after 3 months unless they are on hold).  Haphazard deletion is going to raise questions.  Even if you are consistent about deletion, you may still encounter a judge who questions why you didn’t just save everything because doing so is easier.  Currently, people don’t often go after text messages, but it depends on the situation.  Some people only text (no emails).  Oddest sources of data seen: a Venmo comment field indicating why a payment was made, and chat from an online game.

SaaS or Vendor – An eDiscovery Conversation
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Ick, Math!  Ensuring Production Quality
I moderated this panel, so I didn’t take notes.  You can find the slides here.

Still Looking for the Data
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Data Breach: Incident Response Notification
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

“Small” Data in the Era of “Big” Data
Data minimization reduces the data that can be misused or leaked by deleting it or moving it to more secure storage when it is no longer needed.  People need quick access to the insights from the data, not the raw data itself.  Most people no longer see storage cost as a driver for data minimization, though some do (can be annoying to add storage when maintaining your own secure infrastructure).  A survey by CTRL found that most people say IT should be responsible for the data minimization program.  Legal/compliance should have a role, too.  When a hacker gets into your system, he/she is there for over 200 days on average — lots of time to learn about your data.  Structured data is usually well managed/mapped (85%), but unstructured is not (15%).  Ephemeral technology solves the deletion problem by never storing the data.  Social engineering is one of the biggest ways that data gets out.ig3west_2019_reception

Mobile Device Forensics 2020: An FAQ Session Regarding eDiscovery and Data Privacy Considerations for the Coming Year
It is now possible that visiting the wrong website with your phone can result in it being jailbroken and having malware installed.  iOS sync can spread your data to other devices, so you may have text messages on your computer.  A woman found out about her husband’s affair from his FitBit by noticing his heart rate increased at 4:30am.  Time of death can also be found from a FitBit by when the heart stopped.  No increase in heart rate before a murder sugggests the victim knew the murderer.  Wage and hour litigation uses location tracking.  Collecting app data from a phone may not give you everything you want since the app may store some data on the server.  Collection software may only handle certain versions of an app.  Use two collection tools and see if the results match.  Someone had 1.3 million WeChat chats on one phone.  iTunes is going away — you will be forced to use iCloud instead.  iTunes backup gives more data than iCloud (e.g., deleted messages).  Some of the email might be on the phone, while some might be on the server.  Who owns the data in the cloud?  Jailbreaking is possible again, which gives real access to the data.  When there is a litigation hold and you have the device, use a forensic tool on it.  When you don’t have the device, use the backups.  Backups may be incomplete — the users chooses what to back up (e.g., may not back up photos). If malware gets onto the device, how do you know if the user really sent the text message?  Text message slang the kids use: “kk” = okay (kk instead of k because k will auto-correct to I), and “k.” = whatever (angry).  The chat in Clash of Clans and other games has been used by ISIS and criminals to communicate.  Google’s Project Zero found that China was using an iOS bug to attack people from a particular religious group.

The Human Mind in the Age of Intelligent Machines
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

 

Highlights from Relativity Fest 2019

Relativity Fest relfest2019_keynotecelebrated its tenth anniversary at the Hilton in Chicago.  It featured as many as sixteen simultaneous sessions and was attended by about 2,000 people.  You can find my full set of photos here.

The show was well-organized and there were always plenty of friendly staff around to help.  The keynote introduced the company’s new CEO, Mike Gamson.  Various staff members talked about new functionality that is planned for Relativity.  A live demo of the coming Aero UI highlighted its ability to display very large (dozens of MB) documents quickly.relfest2019_party

I mostly attended the developer sessions.  During the first full day, the sessions I attended were packed and there were people standing in the back.  It thinned out a bit during the remaining days.  The on-premises version of Relativity will be switching from quarterly releases to annual releases because most people don’t want to upgrade so often.  Relativity One will have updates quarterly or faster.  There seems to be a major push to make APIs more uniform and better documented.  There was also a lot of emphasis on reducing breakage of third party tools with new releases.relfest2019_hotel

Highlights from IG3 Mid-Atlantic 2019

The first Mid-Atlantic IG3 was held at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.. It was a day and a half long with a keynote followed by two concurrent sets of sessions.  I’ve provided some notes below from the sessions I was able to attend.  You can find my full set of photos here.ig3east2019_hotel

Big Foot, Aliens, or a Culture of Governance: Are Any of Them Real?
In 2012 12% of companies had a chief data officer, but now 63.4% do.  Better data management can give insight into the business.  It may also be possible to monetize the data.  Cigna has used Watson, but you do have to put work into teaching it.  Remember the days before GPS, when you had to keep driving directions in your head or use printed maps.  Data is now more available.

Practical Applications of AI and Analytics: Gain Insights to Augment Your Review or End It Early
Opposing counsel may not even agree to threading, so getting approval for AI can be a problem.  If the requesting party is the government, they want everything and they don’t care about the cost to you.  TAR 2.0 allows you to jump into review right away with no delay for training by an expert, and it is becoming much more common.  TAR 1.0 is still used for second requests [presumably to produce documents without review].  With TAR 1.0 you know how much review you’ll have to do if you are going to review the docs that will potentially be produced, whereas you don’t with TAR 2.0 [though you could get a rough estimate with additional sampling].  Employees may utilize code words, and some people such as traders use unique lingo — will this cause problems for TAR?  It is useful to use unsupervised learning (clustering) to identify issues and keywords.  Negotiation over TAR use can sometimes be more work than doing the review without TAR.  It is hard to know the size of the benefit that TAR will provide for a project in advance, which can make it hard to convince people to use it.  Do you have to disclose the use of TAR to the other side?  If you are using it to cull, rather than just to prioritize the review, probably.  Courts will soon require or encourage the use of TAR.  There is a proportionality argument that it is unreasonable to not use it.  Data volumes are skyrocketing.  90% of the data in the world was created in the last 2 years.ig3east2019_talk

Is There Room for Governance in Digital Transformation?
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Investigative Analytics and Machine Learning; The Right Mindset, Tools, and Approach can Make all the Difference
You can use e-discovery AI tools to get the investigation going.  Some people still use paper, and the meta data from the label on the box containing the documents may be all you have.  While keyword search may not be very effective, the query may be a starting point for communicating what the person is looking for so you can figure out how to find it.  Use clustering to look for outliers.  Pushing people to use tech just makes them hate you.  Teach them in a way that is relatable.  Listen to the people that are trying to learn and see what they need.  Admit that tech doesn’t always work.  Don’t start filtering the data down too early — you need to understand it first.  It is important to be able to predict things such as cost.  Figure out which people to look at first (tiering).  Convince people to try analytics by pointing out how it can save time so they can spend more time with their kids.  Tech vendors need to be honest about what their products can do (users need to be skeptical).

CCPA and New US Privacy Laws Readiness
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Ick, Math! Ensuring Production Quality
I moderated this panel, so I didn’t take notes.

Effective Data Mapping Policies and Avoiding Pitfalls in GDPR and Data Transfers for Cross-Border Litigations and Investigations
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Technology Solution Update From Corporate, Law Firm and Service Provider Perspective
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Selecting eDiscovery Platforms and Vendors
People often pick services offered by their friends rather than doing an unbiased analysis.  Often do an RFI, then RFP, then POC to see what you really get out of the system.  Does the vendor have experience in your industry?  What is billable vs non-billable?  Are you paying for peer QC?  What does data in/out mean for billing?  Do a test run with the vendor before making any decisions for the long term.  Some vendors charge by the user, instead of, or in addition to, charging based on data volume.  What does “unlimited” really mean?  Government agencies tend to demand a particular way of pricing, and projects are usually 3-5 years.  Charging a lot for a large number of users working on a small database really annoys the customer.  Per-user fees are really a Relativity thing, and other platforms should not attempt it.  Firms will bring data in house to avoid user fees unless the data is too big (e.g., 10GB).  How do dupes impact billing?  Are they charging to extract a dupe?  Concurrent user licenses were annoying, so many moved to named user licenses (typically 4 or 5 to one).  Concurrent licenses may have a burst option to address surges in usage, perhaps setting to the new level.  Some people use TAR on all cases while others in the firm/company never use it, so keep that in mind when licensing it.  Forcing people to use an unfamiliar platform to save money can be a mistake since there may be a lot of effort required to learn it.

eDiscovery Support and Pricing Model — Do we have it all Wrong?
Various pricing models: data in/out + hosting + reviewers, based on number of custodians, or bulk rate (flat monthly fee).  Redaction, foreign language, and privilege logs used to be separate charges, but there is now pressure to include them in the base fee.  Some make processing free but compensate by raising the rate for review.  RFP / procurement is a terrible approach for ediscovery because you work with and need to like the vendor/team.  Ask others about their experience with the vendor, though there is now less variability in quality between the vendors.  Encourage the vendor to make suggestions and not just be an order-taker.  Law firms often blame the vendor when a privileged document is produced, and the lack of transparency about what really happened is frustrating.  The client needs good communication with both the law firm and the vendor.  Law firms shouldn’t offer ediscovery services unless they can do it as well as the vendors (law firms have a fiduciary duty).  ig3east2019_memorial

Still Looking for the Data
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Recycling Your eDiscovery Data: How Managing Data Across Your Portfolio can Help to Reduce Wasteful Spending
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Ready, Fire, Aim!  Negotiating Discovery Protocols
The Mandatory Initial Discovery Pilot Program in the Northern District of Illinois and Arizona requires production within 70 days from filing in order to motivate both sides to get going and cooperate.  One complaint about this is that people want a motion to dismiss to be heard before getting into ediscovery.  Can’t get away with saying “give us everything” under the pilot program since there is not enough time for that to be possible.  Nobody wants to be the unreasonable party under such a tight deadline.  The Commercial Division of the NY Supreme Court encourages categorical privilege logs.  You describe the category, say why it is privileged, and specify how many documents were redacted vs being withheld in their entirety.  Make a list of third parties that received the privileged documents (not a full list of all from/to).  It can be a pain to come up with a set of categories when there is a huge number of documents.  When it comes to TAR protocols, one might disclose the tool used or whether only the inclusive email was produced.  Should the seed set size or elusion set size be disclosed?  Why is the producing party disclosing any of this instead of just claiming that their only responsibility is to produce the documents?  Disclosing may reduce the risk of having a fight over sufficiency.  Government regulators will just tell you to give them everything exactly the way they want it.  When responding to a criminal antitrust investigation you can get in trouble if you standardize the timezone in the data.  Don’t do threading without consent.  A second request may require you to provide a list of all keywords in the collection and their frequencies.  Be careful about orders requiring you to produce the full family — this will compel you to produce non-responsive attachments.

Document Review Pricing Reset
A common approach is hourly pricing for everything (except hosting).  This may be attractive to the customer because other approaches require the vendor to take on risk that the labor will be more than expected and they will build that into the price.  If the customer doesn’t need predictable cost, they won’t want to pay (implicitly) for insurance against a cost overrun.  It is a choice between predictability of cost and lowest cost.  Occasionally review is priced on a per-document basis, but it is hard to estimate what the fair price is since data can vary.  Per-document pricing puts some pressure on the review team to better manage the process for efficiency.  Some clients are asking for a fixed price to handle everything for the next three years. ig3east2019_reflecting_pool A hybrid model has a fixed monthly fee with a lower hourly rate for review, with the lower hourly review making paying for extra QC review less painful.  Using separate vendors and review companies can have a downside if reviewers sit idle while the tech is not ready.  On the other hand, if there are problems with the reviewers it is nice to have the option to swap them out for another review team.

Finding Common Ground: Legal & IT Working Together
I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Highlights from EDRM Workshop 2019

The annual EDRM Workshop was held at Duke Law School edrm2019_buildingstarting on the evening of May 15th and ending at lunch time on the 17th.  It consisted of a mixture of panels, presentations, working group reports, and working sessions focused on various aspects of e-discovery.  I’ve provided some highlights below.  You can find my full set of photos here.

Herb Roitblat presented a paper on fear of missing out (FOMO).  If 80% recall is achieved, is it legitimate for the requesting party to be concerned about what may have been missed in the 20% of the responsive documents that weren’t produced, edrm2019_fomoor are the facts in that 20% duplicative of the facts found in the 80% that was produced?

A panel discussed the issues faced by in-house counsel.  Employees want to use the latest tools, but then you have to worry about how to collect the data (e.g., Skype video recordings).  How to preserve an iPhone?  What if the phone gets lost or stolen?  When doing TAR, can the classifier/model be moved between cases/clients?  New vendors need to be able to explain how they are unique, they need to get established (nobody wants to be on the cutting edge, and it’s hard to get a pilot going), and they should realize that it can take a year to get approval.  There are security/privacy problems with how law firms handle email.  ROI tracking is important.  Analytics is used heavily in investigations, and often in litigation, but they currently only use TAR for prioritization and QC, not to cull the population before review.  Some law firms are adverse to putting data in the cloud, but cloud providers may have better security than law firms.

The GDPR team is working on educating U.S. judges about GDPR and developing a code of conduct.  The EDRM reference will be made easier to update.  The AI group is focused on AI in legal (e.g., estimating recidivism, billing, etc.), not implications of AI for the law.  The TAR group’s paper is out.  The Privilege Logs group wants to avoid duplicating Sedona’s effort (sidenote: lawyers need to learn that an email is not priv just because a lawyer was CC’ed on it).  The Stop Words team is trying to educate people about things such as regular expressions, edrm2019_receptionand warned about cases where you want to search for a single letter or a term such as “AN” (for ammonium nitrate).  The Proportionality group talked about the possibility of having a standard set of documents that should be produced for certain types of cases and providing guidelines for making proportionality arguments to the court.

A panel of judges said that cybersecurity is currently a big issue.  Each court has it’s own approach to security.  Rule 16 conferences need to be taken seriously.  Judges don’t hire e-discovery vendors, so they don’t know costs.  How do you collect a proprietary database?  Lawyers can usually work it out without the judge.  There is good cooperation when the situations of the parties isn’t too asymmetric.  Attorneys need to be more specific in document requests and objections (no boilerplate).  edrm2019_judgesAttorneys should know the case better than the judge, and educate the judge in a way that makes the judge look good.  Know the client’s IT systems and be aware of any data migration efforts.  Stay up on technology (e.g., Slack and text messages).  Have a 502(d) order (some people object because they fear the judge will assume priv review is not needed, but the judges didn’t believe that would happen).  Protect confidential information that is exchanged (what if there is a breach?).   When filing under seal, “attorney’s eyes only” should be used very sparingly, and “confidential” is over used.

TAR vs. Keyword Search Challenge, Round 6 (Instant Feedback)

This was by far the most significant iteration of the ongoing exercise where I challenge an audience to produce a keyword search that works better than technology-assisted review (also known as predictive coding or supervised machine learning).  There were far more participants than previous rounds, and a structural change in the challenge allowed participants to get immediate feedback on the performance of their queries so they could iteratively improve them.  A total of 1,924 queries were submitted by 42 participants (an average of 45.8 queries per person) and higher recall levels were achieved than in any prior version of the challenge, but the audience still couldn’t beat TAR.

In previous versions of the experiment, the audience submitted search queries on paper or through a web form using their phones, and I evaluated a few of them live on stage to see whether the audience was able to achieve higher recall than TAR.  Because the number of live evaluations was so small, the audience had very little opportunity to use the results to improve their queries.  In the latest iteration, participants each had their own computer in the lab at the 2019 Ipro Tech Show, and the web form evaluated the query and gave the user feedback on the recall achieved immediately.  Furthermore, it displayed the relevance and important keywords for each of the top 100 documents matching the query, so participants could quickly discover useful new search terms to tweak their queries.  This gave participants a significant advantage over a normal e-discovery scenario, since they could try an unlimited number of queries without incurring any cost to make relevance determinations on the retrieved documents in order to decide which keywords would improve the queries.  The number of participants was significantly larger than any of the previous iterations, and they had a full 20 minutes to try as many queries as they wanted.  It was the best chance an audience has ever had of beating TAR.  They failed.

To do a fair comparison between TAR and the keyword search results, recall values were compared for equal amounts of document review effort.  In other words, for a specified amount of human labor, which approach gave the best production?  For the search queries, the top 3,000 documents matching the query were evaluated to determine the number that were relevant so recall could be computed (the full population was reviewed in advance, so the relevance of all documents was known). That was compared to the recall for a TAR 3.0 process where 200 cluster centers were reviewed for training and then the top-scoring 2,800 documents were reviewed.  If the system was allowed to continue learning while the top-scoring documents were reviewed, the result was called “TAR 3.0 CAL.”  If learning was terminated after review of the 200 cluster centers, the result was called “TAR 3.0 SAL.”  The process was repeated with review of 6,000 documents instead of 3,000 so you can see how much recall improves if you double the review effort.  Participants could choose to submit queries for any of three topics: biology, medical industry, or law.

The results below labeled “Avg Participant” are computed by finding the highest recall achieved by each participant and averaging those values together.  These are surely somewhat inflated values since one would probably not go through so many iterations of honing the queries in practice (especially since evaluating the efficacy of a query would normally involve considerable labor instead of being free and instantaneous), but I wanted to give the participants as much advantage as I could and including all of the queries instead of just the best ones would have biased the results to be too low due to people making mistakes or experimenting with bad queries just to explore the documents.  The results labeled “Best Participant” show the highest recall achieved by any participant (computed separately for Top 3,000 and Top 6,000, so they may be different queries).

Biology Recall
Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Avg Participant 54.5 69.5
Best Participant 66.0 83.2
TAR 3.0 SAL 72.5 91.0
TAR 3.0 CAL 75.5 93.0
Medical Recall
Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Avg Participant 38.5 51.8
Best Participant 46.8 64.0
TAR 3.0 SAL 67.3 83.7
TAR 3.0 CAL 80.7 88.5
Law Recall
Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Avg Participant 43.1 59.3
Best Participant 60.5 77.8
TAR 3.0 SAL 63.5 82.3
TAR 3.0 CAL 77.8 87.8

As you can see from the tables above, the best result for any participant never beat TAR (SAL or CAL) when there was an equal amount of document review performed.  Furthermore, the average participant result for Top 6,000 never beat the TAR results for Top 3,000, though the best participant result sometimes did, so TAR typically gives a better result even with half as much review effort expended.  The graphs below show the best results for each participant compared to TAR in blue.  The numbers in the legend are the ID numbers of the participants (the color for a particular participant is not consistent across topics).  Click the graph to see a larger version.

bar_graph_bio

bar_graph_medical

bar_graph_law

The large number of people attempting the biology topic was probably due to it being the default, and I illustrated how to use the software with that topic.

One might wonder whether the participants could have done better if they had more than 20 minutes to work on their queries.  The graphs below show the highest recall achieved by any participant as a function of time.  You can see that results improved rapidly during the first 10 minutes, but it became hard to make much additional progress beyond that point.  Also, over half of the audience continued to submit queries after the 20 minute contest, while I was giving the remainder of the presentation.  40% of the queries were submitted during the first 10 minutes, 40% were submitted during the second 10 minutes, and 20% were submitted while I was talking.  Since there were roughly the same number of queries submitted in the second 10 minutes as the first 10 minutes, but much less progress was made, I think it is safe to say that time was not a big factor in the results.

time_bio

time_medical

time_law

In summary, even with a large pool of participants, ample time, and the ability to hone search queries based on instant feedback, nobody was able to generate a better production than TAR when the same amount of review effort was expended.  It seems fair to say that keyword search often requires twice as much document review to achieve a production that is as good as what you would get TAR.

 

 

Highlights from Ipro Tech Show 2019

Ipro renamed their conference from Ipro Innovations to the Ipro Tech Show this year.  As always, it was held at the Talking Stick Resortipro2019_ceo in Arizona and it was very well organized.  It started with a reception on April 29th that was followed by two days of talks.  There were also training days bookending the conference on April 29th and May 2nd.  After the keynote on Tuesday morning, there were five simultaneous tracks for the remainder of the conference, including a lot of hands-on work in computer labs.  I was only able to attend a few of the talks, but I’ve included my notes below. You can find my full set of photos here.  Videos and slides from the presentations are available here.

Dean Brown, who has been Ipro’s CEO for eight months, opened the conference with some information about himself and where the company is headed.  He mentioned that the largest case in a single Ipro database so far was 11 petabytes from 400 million documents.  Q1 2019 was the best quarter in the company’s history, and they had a 98% retention rate.  They’ve doubled spending on development and other departments.

Next, there was a panel where three industry experts discussed artificial intelligence.   AI can be used to analyze legal bills to determine which charges are reasonable.  Google uses AI to monitor and prohibit behaviors within the company, such as stopping your account from being used to do things when you are supposed to be away.  Only about 5% of the audience said they were using TAR.  It was hypothesized that this is due to FRCP 26(g)’s requirement to certify the production as complete and correct.  Many people use Slack instead of e-mail, and dealing with that is an issue for e-discovery.  CLOC was mentioned as an organization helping corporations get a handle on legal spending.ipro2019_lunch

The keynote was given by Kevin Surace, and mostly focused on AI.  You need good data and have to be careful about spurious correlations in the data (he showed various examples that were similar to what you find here).  An AI can watch a video and supplement it with text explaining what the person in the video is doing.  One must be careful about fast changing patterns and black swan events where there is no data available to model.  Doctors are being replaced by software that is better informed about the most recent medical research.  AI can review an NDA faster and more accurately than an attorney.  There is now a news channel in China using an AI news anchor instead of a human to deliver the news.  With autonomous vehicles, transportation will become free (supported by ads in the vehicle).  AI will have an impact 100 times larger than the Internet.ipro2019_juggle

I gave a talk titled “Technology: The Cutting Edge and Where We’re Headed” that focused on AI.  I started by showing the audience five pairs of images from WhichFaceIsReal.com and challenged them to determine which face was real and which was generated by an AI.  When I asked if anyone got all five right, I only saw one person raise their hand.  When I asked if anyone got all five wrong, I saw three hands go up.  Admittedly, I picked image pairs that I thought were particularly difficult, but the result is still a little scary.ipro2019_hotel

I also gave a talk titled “TAR Versus Keyword Challenge” where I challenged the audience to construct a keyword search that worked better than technology-assisted review.  The format of this exercise was very different from previous iterations, making it easy for participants to test and hone their queries.  We had 1,924 queries submitted by 42 participants.  They achieved the highest recall levels seen so far, but still couldn’t beat TAR.  A detailed analysis is available here.

Misleading Metrics and Irrelevant Research (Accuracy and F1)

If one algorithm achieved 98.2% accuracy while another had 98.6% for the same task, would you be surprised to find that the first algorithm required ten times as much document review to reach 75% recall compared to the second algorithm?  This article explains why some performance metrics don’t give an accurate view of performance for ediscovery purposes, and why that makes a lot of research utilizing such metrics irrelevant for ediscovery.

The key performance metrics for ediscovery are precision and recall.  Recall, R, is the percentage of all relevant documents that have been found.  High recall is critical to defensibility.  Precision, P, is the percentage of documents predicted to be relevant that actually are relevant.  High precision is desirable to avoid wasting time reviewing non-relevant documents (if documents will be reviewed to confirm relevance and check for privilege before production).  In other words, precision is related to cost.  Specifically, 1/P is the average number of documents you’ll have to review per relevant document found.  When using technology-assisted review (predictive coding), documents can be sorted by relevance score and you can choose any point in the sorted list and compute the recall and precision that would be achieved by treating documents above that point as being predicted to be relevant.  One can plot a precision-recall curve by doing precision and recall calculations at various points in the sorted document list.

The precision-recall curve to the rightknn_precision compares two different classification algorithms applied to the same task.  To do a sensible comparison, we should compare precision values at the same level of recall.  In other words, we should compare the cost of reaching equally good (same recall) productions.  Furthermore, the recall level where the algorithms are compared should be one that is sensible for for ediscovery — achieving high precision at a recall level a court wouldn’t accept isn’t very useful.  If we compare the two algorithms at R=75%, 1-NN has P=6.6% and 40-NN has P=70.4%.  In other words, if you sort by relevance score with the two algorithms and review documents from top down until 75% of the relevant documents are found, you would review 15.2 documents per relevant document found with 1-NN and 1.4 documents per relevant document found with 40-NN.  The 1-NN algorithm would require over ten times as much document review as 40-NN.  1-NN has been used in some popular TAR systems.  I explained why it performs so badly in a previous article.

There are many other performance metrics, but they can be written as a mixture of precision and recall (see Chapter 7 of the current draft of my book).  Anything that is a mixture of precision and recall should raise an eyebrow — how can you mix together two fundamentally different things (defensibility and cost) into a single number and get a useful result?  Such metrics imply a trade-off between defensibility and cost that is not based on reality.  Research papers that aren’t focused on ediscovery often use such performance measures and compare algorithms without worrying about whether they are achieving the same recall, or whether the recall is high enough to be considered sufficient for ediscovery.  Thus, many conclusions about algorithm effectiveness simply aren’t applicable for ediscovery because they aren’t based on relevant metrics.

One popular metric is accuracy, knn_accuracywhich is the percentage of predictions that are correct.  If a system predicts that none of the documents are relevant and prevalence is 10% (meaning 10% of the documents are relevant), it will have 90% accuracy because its predictions were correct for all of the non-relevant documents.  If prevalence is 1%, a system that predicts none of the documents are relevant achieves 99% accuracy.  Such incredibly high numbers for algorithms that fail to find anything!  When prevalence is low, as it often is in ediscovery, accuracy makes everything look like it performs well, including algorithms like 1-NN that can be a disaster at high recall.  The graph to the right shows the accuracy-recall curve that corresponds to the earlier precision-recall curve (prevalence is 2.633% in this case), showing that it is easy to achieve high accuracy with a poor algorithm by evaluating it at a low recall level that would not be acceptable for ediscovery.  The maximum accuracy achieved by 1-NN in this case was 98.2% and the max for 40-NN was 98.6%.  In case you are curious, the relationship between accuracy, precision, and recall is:
ACC = 1 - \rho (1 - R) - \rho R (1 - P) / P
where \rho is the prevalence.

Another popular metric is the F1 score.knn_f1  I’ve criticized its use in ediscovery before.  The relationship to precision and recall is:
F_1 = 2 P R / (P + R)
The F1 score lies between the precision and the recall, and is closer to the smaller of the two.  As far as F1 is concerned, 30% recall with 90% precision is just as good as 90% recall with 30% precision (both give F1 = 0.45) even though the former probably wouldn’t be accepted by a court and the latter would.   F1 cannot be large at small recall, unlike accuracy, but it can be moderately high at modest recall, making it possible to achieve a decent F1 score even if performance is disastrously bad at the high recall levels demanded by ediscovery.  The graph to the right shows that 1-NN manages to achieve a maximum F1 of 0.64, which seems pretty good compared to the 0.73 achieved by 40-NN, giving no hint that 1-NN requires ten times as much review to achieve 75% recall in this example.

Hopefully this article has convinced you that it is important for research papers to use the right metric, specifically precision (or review effort) at high recall, when making algorithm comparisons that are useful for ediscovery.

TAR vs. Keyword Search Challenge, Round 5

The audience was challenged to construct a keyword search query that is more effective than technology-assisted review (TAR) at IG3 West 2018.  The procedure was the same as round 4, so I won’t repeat the details here.  The audience was small this time and we only got one query submission for each topic.  The submission for the law topic used AND to join the keywords together and matched no articles, so I changed the ANDs to ORs before evaluating it.  The results and queries are below.  TAR beat the keyword searches by a huge margin this time.

Biology Recall
Query Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Search 20.1% 20.1%
TAR 3.0 SAL 72.5% 91.0%
TAR 3.0 CAL 75.5% 93.0%
Medical Recall
Query Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Search 28.5% 38.1%
TAR 3.0 SAL 67.3% 83.7%
TAR 3.0 CAL 80.7% 88.5%
Law Recall
Query Top 3,000 Top 6,000
Search 5.5% 9.4%
TAR 3.0 SAL 63.5% 82.3%
TAR 3.0 CAL 77.8% 87.8%

tar_vs_search5_biology

tar_vs_search5_medical

tar_vs_search5_law

biology query: (Evolution OR develop) AND (Darwin OR bird OR cell)
medical query: Human OR body OR medicine OR insurance OR license OR doctor OR patient
law query: securities OR conspiracy OR RICO OR insider