Using Predictive Coding for Privilege Review

A global law firm client was being pressured by its corporate banking client to save cost on potentially privileged document review. The firm typically performed this review via a traditional keyword search set and hit document review, with relatively senior reviewers. In order to win the work, the firm turned to Consilio for guidance. Consilio recommended a two-pronged approach to review – one “safety” approach to prioritise documents using Clustering Analysis and one “aggressive” approach that would yield considerable savings, using Backstop predictive coding. While the safety approach worked just fine, the aggressive approach using predictive coding turned out to be an excellent leverage point – ultimately saving the client from having to review 62% of the search term hit documents at 95% +/- 2% recall, a savings of over US$200,000 and 1 week of time. Sampling of the likely not privileged document set confirmed the accuracy of the approach.