Adapting to the data explosion: Ensuring justice for all

The age of electronic information will continue to engender a technological evolution to which the efforts of human beings will have to adjust. In the legal realm in the United States, the time and costs associated with meeting a party´s obligations to search and turn over relevant electronic data for litigation threatens to drive litigants out of the courts. There is now judicial recognition that technological tools, especially for automated search, will have to play a role in case discovery, which used to be handled by humans alone. Improved understanding of human-machine interplay is of growing importance to provide effective, and cost effective, information retrieval in this litigation context. Pairing technology and human expertise in a sophisticated way can provide benefits not possible when either is used on its own.