The Emergence of ECA Thoughtware:
TAR - Technology Assisted Review (TAR) is a process of having computer software electronically classify documents based on input from expert reviewers, in an effort to expedite the organization and prioritization of the document collection.
Here is a quote from a few years ago about these tools and where these ECA providers were to be headed and much of this has come to pass:
"Firstly the Early Case Assessment tools are often not geared up for the highly detailed linear review, which will be required once the bulk of the documents have been culled. RingTail, for example, has an incredibly granular capability, from using multiple highlighting colors to rotating individual pages in a document that have not been scanned correctly. Most people who are producing early case assessment tools recognize this and currently recommend that their tool is used for a first review (hence the name), and the detail work is done in more of the heavy weight linear review tools. This alone means that the linear review platforms are here for a while yet; of course those building the ECA platforms are no doubt working on producing a more detailed review platform, introducing tiffing, redaction, etc. The ECA camp are, almost certainly, going to move into the linear review market space sooner rather than later."
Linear review is from: - http://whereismydata.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/electronic-discovery-what-is-linear-review/
“linear review” is a traditional review of documents within an electronic discovery review platform.This means that the legal team, review team, or investigators, will look at one document after another, ordered by date or keyword relevance. This is very much a brute force method to reviewing the documents, looking at one document after another, until the entire data set is complete.
If the aim is to review the entire mail box of one custodian, this is probably the best method of conducting the review.
But if the aim is to find documents relevant to a breach of contract across company, over a a 5 year period where there could well be millions of documents, a linear review will either be hugely expensive or impossible to attempt, due to the time, resources, or costs involved.
In these large scale reviews, concept searching methods or “non-linear” review are often employed, as they are the only feasible method of approaching the task.