During the past decade breakthroughs in GPU hardware and deep neural networks technologies have revolutionized the field of computer vision, making image analytical potentials accessible to a range of real-world applications. Technology Assisted Review (TAR) in electronic discovery though traditionally has dominantly dealt with textual content, is witnessing a rising need to incorporate multimedia content in the scope. We have developed innovative image analytics applications for TAR in the past years, such as image classification, image clustering, and object detection, etc. In this paper, we discuss the use of image clustering applications to facilitate TAR based on our experiences in serving clients. We describe our general workflow on leveraging image clustering in tasks and use statistics from real projects to showcase the effectiveness of using image clustering in TAR. We also summarize lessons learned and best practices on using image clustering in TAR.

Protecting privileged communications and data from inadvertent disclosure is a paramount task in the US legal practice. Traditionally counsels rely on keyword searching and manual review to identify privileged documents in cases. As data volumes increase, this approach becomes less and less defensible in costs. Machine learning methods have been used in identifying privilege documents. Given the generalizable nature of privilege in legal cases, we hypothesize that transfer learning can capitalize knowledge learned from existing labeled data to identify privilege documents without requiring labeling new training data. In this paper, we study both traditional machine learning models and deep learning models based on BERT for privilege document classification tasks in legal document review, and we examine the effectiveness of transfer learning in privilege model on three real world datasets with privilege labels. Our results show that BERT model outperforms the industry standard logistic regression algorithm and transfer learning models can achieve decent performance on datasets in same or close domains.

Protecting privileged communications and data from disclosure is paramount for legal teams. Legal advice, such as attorney-client communications or litigation strategy are typically exempt from disclosure in litigations or regulatory events and are vital to the attorney-client relationship. To protect this information from disclosure, companies and outside counsel often review vast amounts of documents to determine those that contain privileged material. This process is extremely costly and time consuming. As data volumes increase, legal counsel normally employs methods to reduce the number of documents requiring review while balancing the need to ensure the protection of privileged information. Keyword searching is relied upon as a method to target privileged information and reduce document review populations. Keyword searches are effective at casting a wide net but often return overly inclusive results – most of which do not contain privileged information. To overcome the weaknesses of keyword searching, legal teams increasingly are using machine learning techniques to target privileged information. In these studies, classic text classification techniques are applied to build classification models to identify privileged documents. In this paper, the authors propose a different method by applying machine learning / convolutional neural network techniques (CNN) to identify privileged documents. Our proposed method combines keyword searching with CNN. For each keyword term, a CNN model is created using the context of the occurrences of the keyword. In addition, a method was proposed to select reliable privileged (positive) training keyword occurrences from labeled positive training documents. Extensive experiments were conducted, and the results show that the proposed methods can significantly reduce false positives while still capturing most of the true positives.

In eDiscovery, it is critical to ensure that each page produced in legal proceedings conforms with the requirements of court or government agency production requests. Errors in productions could have severe consequences in a case, putting a party in an adverse position. The volume of pages produced continues to increase, and tremendous time and effort has been taken to ensure quality control of document productions. This has historically been a manual and laborious process. This paper demonstrates a novel automated production quality control application which leverages deep learning-based image recognition technology to extract Bates Number and Confidentiality Stamping from legal case production images and validate their correctness. Effectiveness of the method is verified with an experiment using a real-world production data.

Though technology assisted review in electronic discovery has been focusing on text data, the need of advanced analytics to facilitate reviewing multimedia content is on the rise. In this paper, we present several applications of deep learning in computer vision to Technology Assisted Review of image data in legal industry. These applications include image classification, image clustering, and object detection. We use transfer learning techniques to leverage established pretrained models for feature extraction and fine tuning. These applications are first of their kind in the legal industry for image document review. We demonstrate effectiveness of these applications with solving real world business challenges.

Research has shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can be effectively applied to text classification as part of a predictive coding protocol. That said, most research to date has been conducted on data sets with short documents that do not reflect the variety of documents in real world document reviews. Using data from four actual reviews with documents of varying lengths, we compared CNN with other popular machine learning algorithms for text classification, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest. For each data set, classification models were trained with different training sample sizes using different learning algorithms. These models were then evaluated using a large randomly sampled test set of documents, and the results were compared using precision and recall curves. Our study demonstrates that CNN performed well, but that there was no single algorithm that performed the best across the combination of data sets and training sample sizes. These results will help advance research into the legal profession's use of machine learning algorithms that maximize performance.

Companies regularly spend millions of dollars producing electronically-stored documents in legal matters. Over the past two decades, attorneys have been using a variety of technologies to conduct this exercise, and most recently, parties on both sides of the `legal aisle' are accepting the use of machine learning techniques like text classification to cull massive volumes of data and to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. While text classification is regularly used to reduce the discovery costs in legal matters, text classification also faces a peculiar perception challenge: amongst lawyers, this technology is sometimes looked upon as a black box Put simply, very little information is provided for attorneys to understand why documents are classified as responsive. In recent years, a group of AI and Machine Learning researchers have been actively researching Explainable AI. In an explainable AI system, actions or decisions are human understandable. In legal `document review' scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, as long as one or more of the text snippets (small passages of text) in a document are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if text classification can be used to locate these responsive snippets, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's document classification decision. When deployed with defined and explainable results, text classification can drastically enhance the overall quality and speed of the document review process by reducing the time it takes to review documents. Moreover, explainable predictive coding provides lawyers with greater confidence in the results of that supervised learning task. This paper describes a framework for explainable text classification as a valuable tool in legal services: for enhancing the quality and efficiency of legal document review and for assisting in locating responsive snippets within responsive documents. This framework has been implemented in our legal analytics product, which has been used in hundreds of legal matters. We also report our experimental results using the data from an actual legal matter that used this type of document review.

In today's legal environment, lawsuits and regulatory investigations require companies to embark upon increasingly intensive data-focused engagements to identify, collect and analyze large quantities of data. When documents are staged for review - where they are typically assessed for relevancy or privilege - the process can require companies to dedicate an extraordinary level of resources, both with respect to human resources, but also with respect to the use of technology-based techniques to intelligently sift through data. Companies regularly spend millions of dollars producing `responsive' electronically-stored documents for these types of matters. For several years, attorneys have been using a variety of tools to conduct this exercise, and most recently, they are accepting the use of machine learning techniques like text classification (referred to as predictive coding in the legal industry) to efficiently cull massive volumes of data to identify responsive documents for use in these matters. In recent years, a group of AI and Machine Learning researchers have been actively researching Explainable AI. In an explainable AI system, actions or decisions are human understandable. In typical legal `document review' scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, as long as one or more of the text snippets (small passages of text) in a document are deemed responsive. In these scenarios, if predictive coding can be used to locate these responsive snippets, then attorneys could easily evaluate the model's document classification decision. When deployed with defined and explainable results, predictive coding can drastically enhance the overall quality and speed of the document review process by reducing the time it takes to review documents. Moreover, explainable predictive coding provides lawyers with greater confidence in the results of that supervised learning task. The authors of this paper propose the concept of explainable predictive coding and simple explainable predictive coding methods to locate responsive snippets within responsive documents. We also report our preliminary experimental results using the data from an actual legal matter that entailed this type of document review. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of explainable predictive coding in the context of professional services in the legal space.

Protecting privileged communications and data from disclosure is paramount for legal teams. Unrestricted legal advice, such as attorney-client communications or litigation strategy. are vital to the legal process and are exempt from disclosure in litigations or regulatory events. To protect this information from being disclosed, companies and outside counsel must review vast amounts of documents to determine those that contain privileged material. This process is extremely costly and time consuming. As data volumes increase, legal counsel employ methods to reduce the number of documents requiring review while balancing the need to ensure the protection of privileged information. Keyword searching is relied upon as a method to target privileged information and reduce document review populations. Keyword searches are effective at casting a wide net but return over inclusive results - most of which do not contain privileged information - and without detailed knowledge of the data, keyword lists cannot be crafted to find all privilege material. Overly-inclusive keyword searching can also be problematic, because even while it drives up costs, it also can cast `too far of a net' and thus produce unreliable results.To overcome these weaknesses of keyword searching, legal teams are using a new method to target privileged information called predictive modeling. Predictive modeling can successfully identify privileged material but little research has been published to confirm its effectiveness when compared to keyword searching. This paper summarizes a study of the effectiveness of keyword searching and predictive modeling when applied to real- world data. With this study, this group of collaborators wanted to examine and understand the benefits and weaknesses of both approaches to legal teams with identifying privilege material in document populations.

Training documents have a significant impact on the performance of predictive models in the legal domain. Yet, there is limited research that explores the effectiveness of the training document selection strategy - in particular, the strategy used to select the seed set, or the set of documents an attorney reviews first to establish an initial model. Since there is limited research on this important component of predictive coding, the authors of this paper set out to identify strategies that consistently perform well. Our research demonstrated that the seed set selection strategy can have a significant impact on the precision of a predictive model. Enabling attorneys with the results of this study will allow them to initiate the most effective predictive modeling process to comb through the terabytes of data typically present in modern litigation. This study used documents from four actual legal cases to evaluate eight different seed set selection strategies. Attorneys can use the results contained within this paper to enhance their approach to predictive coding.

Predictive coding has been widely used in legal matters to find relevant or privileged documents in large sets of electronically stored information. It saves the time and cost significantly. Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are two popular machine learning algorithms used in predictive coding. Recently, deep learning received a lot of attentions in many industries. This paper reports our preliminary studies in using deep learning in legal document review. Specifically, we conducted experiments to compare deep learning results with results obtained using a SVM algorithm on the four datasets of real legal matters. Our results showed that CNN performed better with larger volume of training dataset and should be a fit method in the text classification in legal industry.

One type of machine learning, text classification, is now regularly applied in the legal matters involving voluminous document populations because it can reduce the time and expense associated with the review of those documents. One form of machine learning - Active Learning - has drawn attention from the legal community because it offers the potential to make the machine learning process even more effective. Active Learning, applied to legal documents, is considered a new technology in the legal domain and is continuously applied to all documents in a legal matter until an insignificant number of relevant documents are left for review. This implementation is slightly different than traditional implementations of Active Learning where the process stops once achieving acceptable model performance. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to question whether Active Learning actually is a superior learning methodology and (ii) to highlight the ways that Active Learning can be most effectively applied to real legal industry data. Unlike other studies, our experiments were performed against large data sets taken from recent, real-world legal matters covering a variety of areas. We conclude that, although these experiments show the Active Learning strategy popularly used in legal document review can quickly identify informative training documents, it becomes less effective over time. In particular, our findings suggest this most popular form of Active Learning in the legal arena, where the highest-scoring documents are selected as training examples, is in fact not the most efficient approach in most instances. Ultimately, a different Active Learning strategy may be best suited to initiate the predictive modeling process but not to continue through the entire document review.

Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better understand the threat of malicious cyber actors, this study develops a methodology to monitor and evaluate web activity using data archived from Google Analytics. Google Analytics collects and aggregates web traffic, including information about web visitors' location, date and time of visit, visited webpages, and searched keywords. This study seeks to streamline analysis of this data and uses rule-based anomaly detection and predictive modeling to identify web traffic that deviates from normal patterns. Rather than evaluating pieces of web traffic individually, the methodology seeks to emulate real user behavior by creating a new unit of analysis: the user session. User sessions group individual pieces of traffic from the same location and date, which transforms the available information from single point-in-time snapshots to dynamic sessions showing users' trajectory and intent. The result is faster and better insight into large volumes of noisy web traffic.

Predictive coding, once used in only a small fraction of legal and business matters, is now widely deployed to quickly cull through increasingly vast amounts of data and reduce the need for costly and inefficient human document review. Previously, the sole front-end input used to create a predictive model was the exemplar documents (training data) chosen by subject-matter experts. Many predictive coding tools require users to rely on static preprocessing parameters and a single machine learning algorithm to develop the predictive model. Little research has been published discussing the impact preprocessing parameters and learning algorithms have on the effectiveness of the technology. A deeper dive into the generation of a predictive model shows that the settings and algorithm can have a strong effect on the accuracy and efficacy of a predictive coding tool. Understanding how these input parameters affect the output will empower legal teams with the information they need to implement predictive coding as efficiently and effectively as possible. This paper outlines different preprocessing parameters and algorithms as applied to multiple real-world data sets to understand the influence of various approaches.

Distributed information retrieval will be a general practice of searching in the exponentially growing scientific literature. At the core of the success for efficient and effective distributed literature search is an adequate sharding policy. This paper proposes a novel sharding policy for literature search that bases on cutting the document citation and co-citation graphs. Experiments on the iSearch test collection reveal that relevant documents for a given query distribute over the shards generated through citation graph cutting in such a pattern that a few shards becomes optimal shards thus can be leveraged in a selective search strategy, potentially leading to efficient and effective literature search solutions.