Reaffirming the Superiority of Human Attorneys in legal Document Review and Examining the Limitations of Algorithmic Approaches to Discovery': Not So Fast

In Humans Against the Machines: Reaffirming the Superiority of Human Attorneys in Legal Document Review and Examining the Limitations of Algorithmic Approaches to Discovery, Robert Keeling et al. “challeng[e] the prevailing wisdom around what predictive coding purports to do, and argu[e] that machines are simply not what they are promoted to be, especially in the discovery process.” We choose not to address their erroneous claims that “the results of prior research on predictive coding . . . reveal flaws,” or their asserted “correct[ion] of misunderstandings,” except to say that the study cited in footnote 143 of their paper corroborates the prior research findings and explicitly addresses the impact of manual review as a component of technologyassisted review (“TAR”), showing that manual screening of the results of “predictive coding” increases precision at the expense of recall.