Finding the Signal in the Noise: Information Governance, Analytics, and the Future of Legal Practice

In the watershed year of 2012, the world of law witnessed the first concrete discussion of how predictive analytics may be used to make legal practice more efficient.  That the conversation about the use of predictive analytics has emerged out of the e-Discovery sector of the law is not all that surprising: in the last decade and with increasing force since 2006—with the passage of revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that expressly took into account the fact that lawyers must confront “electronically stored information” in all its varieties—there has been a growing recognition among courts and commentators that the practice of litigation is changing dramatically.  What needs now to be recognized, however, is that the rapidly evolving tools and techniques that have been so helpful in providing efficient responses to document requests in complex litigation may be used in a variety of complementary ways to the discovery process itself.