Study Reveals Automated Document Review Outperforms Human Reviewers by 90 Percent in Accuracy
H5’s automated document review the subject of groundbreaking industry study
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - November 1, 2005 — A landmark study released today demonstrates that H5’s automated document review service, an outsourced combination of expert professional services and advanced technologies, reduces the risk of missing relevant documents by 90 percent or more when compared to manual review conducted by a team of contract attorneys and paralegals.
“Recent technological developments in the area of automated document review for relevance assessment are…paving the way for profound and fundamental changes in the way discovery is conducted,” states the study.
The study was conducted by attorney and independent litigation management expert Anne Kershaw on behalf of a Fortune 100 company. The results of the study show that H5’s automated review reduced the risk of missing relevant documents by more than 90 percent compared to the best available alternative.
“This comparative study is unprecedented in the emerging world of large-scale document review,” said H5 CEO Nicolas Economou. “It confirms the limited accuracy of conventional manual review methods and demonstrates the qualitative leap that can be achieved by the expert combination of technology and domain expertise applied to the challenges of document review which, to date, is only offered by H5.“
The unparalleled performance achieved in the study is due to H5’s novel approach to large-scale review. Unlike e-discovery vendors, H5 does not provide clients or their law firms with search software; instead, its model involves the controlled use of a range of information retrieval technologies and expert professional services as part of meticulously defined project design, development, and quality assurance processes. Combined, these factors enable H5 to significantly reduce the risk of missing relevant information compared to manual review or to manual review supported by state-of-the-art e-discovery software.
The Study
The study took a set of 48,000 documents, to be coded for relevance to three responsive categories, and pitted H5’s automated review process against a small team of highly trained reviewers who separately reviewed a random sample of the documents via traditional manual review. The results of the study showed that, across all three codes, H5’s automated review identified more than 95 percent of the relevant documents on average, while the human reviewers identified an average of just 51 percent. The study is discussed at greater length in Kershaw’s article, “Automated Document Review Proves Its Reliability” (published in Digital Discovery and e-Evidence, November 2005).
Anne Kershaw is an experienced litigation lawyer and the founder of A. Kershaw, P.C. // Attorneys & Consultants, a nationally recognized litigation management consulting firm providing independent analysis and innovative recommendations for the management of all aspects of volume litigation challenges. She is also a contributing editor of The Sedona Conference Glossary For E-Discovery and Digital Information Management and co-founder of the eDiscovery Institute, a non-profit e-discovery research organization operating under an advisory panel consisting of prominent academics, judges, and electronic data discovery experts.
About H5
At H5, we are dedicated to finding information that our clients need to win cases, meet regulatory requirements, and address risks before they become liabilities. By combining advanced technologies with expertise in search and information analysis, we deliver customized solutions to help corporations and law firms meet their legal discovery, compliance, and information management objectives. Numerous independent studies have proven that H5’s approach delivers greater cost savings and more accurate results than any alternative.