Judge issues opinion on computer-assisted review.

• Position: E-DISCOVERY - Andrew Peck

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In what may be the first time a court has approved the use of computer-assisted review in electronic discovery, Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York) determined that it may be used in "appropriate cases" for reviewing large volumes of documents.

In Monique Da Silva Moore, et al. v. Publicis Groupe & MSL Group, five women plaintiffs sued a large advertising firm and its U.S. public relations subsidiary for gender discrimination, according to Law Technology News.

Peck cited a study that concluded technology-assisted review is more accurate--and 50 times more economical--than "exhaustive manual review." In other words, it determined that computers do a better job than humans in reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) for discovery production.

He also acknowledged that computer-assisted review should not be used in all cases, and the protocols he approved in the Moore case may not be appropriate in all future cases that use computer-assisted review, Law Technology News said.

In this process, which is also called "predictive coding," a "screening program is revised and re-revised to refine subsequent searches to find a higher percentage of relevant documents than ordinary keyword-based review," according to an article by Alison Frankel on Thomson Reuters News & Insight.

Peck acknowledged that judges and parties have worried about being the first to produce discovery by way of predictive coding, for fear that the document production process wouldn't hold up to scrutiny. He also said...