Joseph Craig
According to industry leaders, Australian firms have been slow in embracing technological advances when it comes to dispute resolution. Unlike Australia, other legal markets in the overseas have shown their interest in readily adopting technology and its advancement in the legal sector. “Australian law firms have not yet adopted the latest dispute resolution technology,” said eDiscovery’s manager, Martin Flavell, while he was speaking with Aussie Lawyer Blog. He also said that in terms of technology, Australia is behind with a few years as compared to countries like US.
In addition, law firms in Australia have shown reluctance in adopting emerging technologies such as predictive coding that are now emerging in countries like US. “There is still no reason why our firms should avoid such impressive technological improvements because eDiscovery has been in Australia for at least a decade,” said Mr. Flavell. He added that the main reason as to why the Australian legal markets are encouraged to adopt the new technological advances is because technology or coding assisted review helps in selecting relevant documents in a case by combining computer algorithms with human review. With this new system, a team can run the remaining documents through the predictive coding software after selecting a number of files that are considered highly relevant with the case, instead of paralegals going through a long list of documents.
There are numerous advantages that come with adopting this new technology and they include reducing costs and the manual tasks involved in discovery, identifying other relevant documents, and it also saves the law firm’s precious time. This is because the software examines the words and phrases used in the subset of documents that the law firm’s team selects. Instead of spending weeks with paralegals going through many documents, you can consider running the program overnight and it is done. “The best thing that I love with this technology is the fact that it helps in reducing the most important and significant part of litigation,” said Mr. Flavell.
On the other hand, the main reason why Australian firms are shying away from using this method is because they are used to the paper work, hence they often view the technological approach as a risk. However, “some firms have started to adopt the new method although it caused much discussion a few years ago,” added Mr. Flavell. He said that the electronic removal of duplicates alone can help lower the document’s volume by a big percentage given that the extent to which eDiscovery can cull documents varies from one case to the other.
