Extract from Jenny Roberts’ article “Predictive Coding, English Law, and the Disclosure Pilot Scheme”
Linear review used to be the golden standard in edisclosure, particularly when the volume of an entire document collection tended to be smaller. It was industry practice to have human eyes review every document, and this practice carried over into electronic document review, often utilising large teams of document reviewers. Whilst culling was commonplace, using objective metadata characteristics such as date and custodian, and also more subjective criteria such as keyword searches, linear review soon became impractical when modern data formats and communication technologies made the volume of information in a body of documents grow exponentially. Use of techniques such as threaded review by inclusive emails and coding propagation do help with volume reduction. However, nowadays a document corpus could easily number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of documents, and linear review is no longer practical for many cases involving electronically stored information.
