Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

... Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts - like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East - even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

The economic impact will be huge," said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We're at the beginning of a 10-year period where we're going to transition from computers that can't understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language."

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

... E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as "linguistic" and "sociological."

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora , an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people - who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing "digital anomalies" that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds "call me" moments - those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

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