UK Decision Approving the Use of TAR

This past February, the Chancery Division of the High Court of England and Wales approved the use of predictive coding in the United Kingdom for the first time in Pyrrho Investments, Ltd. v. MWB Property, Ltd. . The High Court made its decision with respect to a matter in which the 'e-disclosure' involved the review of more than 3 million electronic files recovered from back-up tapes - culled down from an original set of 17.6 million files. Predictive coding was approved based on the following 10 factors:

1. Other jurisdictions showed that predictive coding can be useful in the right kind of cases.

2. Evidence shows that predictive coding is just as accurate, if not more so, than manual review.

3. The use of a single, more experienced lawyer to create the seed set leads to more consistent results.

4. The Civil Procedure Rules of England don't prohibit the use of predictive coding.

5. A high volume of electronic documents must be reviewed.

6. Manual review of the data set would be very expensive, and hence unreasonable where an automated alternative exists.

7. Whether manual review must still be carried out after the predictive coding process has been run.

8. The amount at issue was high enough to justify the cost of the predictive coding software review.

9. If the predictive coding software yielded poor results, the parties would still have time to use other methods of review.

10. Whether or not the parties agreed on the use of predictive coding.