Extract from Rachel McAdams, Andrew Lyons, and Kayode Okubanjo’s article “A Crash Course in TAR: What Do You Really Need to Know?”
Technology-assisted review (TAR) has gone from a new technology to a critical element in a relatively short period of time. The first judicial approval of TAR in e-discovery was in the United States, in the February 2012 Opinion and Order in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe. Ireland followed in 2015 and the UK in 2016, and the use of TAR is now an everyday occurrence across the globe.
When embarking on a new project, the question of whether or not to use TAR is often near the top of the list, and most large projects won’t go ahead without some element of TAR to speed along the review. However, for those new to discovery or those not involved heavily in the technology of discovery, it can be difficult to work out exactly what is being proposed, or the difference between types of methods. This article will give a brief introduction of TAR and lay out the basics of what you really need to know to start taking advantage of TAR.
What is TAR?
TAR is the use of computer software in legal proceedings or cases to automatically categorise documents. This is driven by a process of using “machine learning” which helps the computer make decisions. Machine learning is a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which the computer first learns from human coding decisions, and then tries to make additional coding decisions independently.
