Beating the system

The exponential growth in the volume of electronic documents has prompted increased demand for more sophisticated tools and technologies to assist in tackling a review exercise. Even a fairly modest exercise involving the documentation for one or two individuals could easily involve sifting through tens of thousands of documents. Suppliers of these tools and technologies operate in a highly competitive and demanding environment, which encourages them to invest in innovation.

Typically these advances in technology have focused on tools to assist with the analysis and sorting of a data set into a more structured and easy to review format. Examples of these include advanced visual analytics, so a user can quickly ascertain who has been speaking to whom; and topic grouping, which allows a user to sort documents into relevant silos, so that a reviewer can tackle one subject matter at a time. Recent developments in legal technologies have focused on how technology can be utilised to take some