Extract from Catalyst’s “Was It a Document Dump or a Deficient TAR Process?”
That’s the topic of our recent TAR Talk podcast.* We talked about the recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia In Re Domestic Airline Travel Antitrust Litigation, 2018 WL 4441507 (D.D.C. Sept. 13, 2018), an antitrust class action lawsuit against the four largest commercial airlines in the United States—American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines.
The declarations around this decision prompted much discussion in the e-discovery world, particularly for those using technology-assisted review (TAR) in the review process. The argument was based on United’s core document production. The plaintiffs called it a deficient TAR process and complained that they were forced to review mountains of non-relevant documents (aka, a document dump).
Was this a case of backing up the truck? Or, was it human error compounded by the limitations of a TAR 1.0 platform?
This is an interesting case with some lessons learned on where we believe things went wrong and how the plaintiffs could have reviewed the production expeditiously and cost-effectively.
