By now you have probably heard about the February 16th ruling in the case Pyrrho Investments and MWB Business Exchange v. MWB Property and others by Master Matthews of English High Court. (If not, our friend Chris Dale of the eDisclosure Information Project is hosting the ruling here.)

In the ruling, Master Matthews outlines many of today’s e-discovery (or ‘e-disclosure’) challenges for litigants – the growing mountain of data for any-sized litigant, and the shortcomings of keyword searches. Master Matthews then goes on to state that predictive coding follows a process that is not completely new and outlines ten factors for why predictive coding makes sense for certain cases. If you’ve been following the US case law on predictive coding, as well as the numerous blogs, articles and conference panels on predictive coding adoption, these ten factors will likely be familiar to you. They include an argument for proportionality, better consistency in coding decisions, and the fact that predictive coding has not resulted in more accidental disclosure than manual review.

Ringtail e-discovery software users have long benefited from our predictive coding functionality, so this ruling is welcome news to our organization and our UK-based clients. We’re also proud of the fact that our predictive coding functionality, combined with our visual analytics approach, is focused on helping users understand and explain the predictive coding results. That is, predictive coding can provide great cost-savings and help speed review, but legal teams are better served if they can explain the process and the predictive coding results.

If you’d like to learn more, we have a white paper discussing how to take predictive coding “out of the black box.”