Probably Reasonable Search in eDiscovery
This addresses the need for courts and parties in lawsuits to assess the reasonableness of eDiscovery searches, but it is incremental as it builds on existing recall estimation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of determining whether additional search effort in eDiscovery is justified by providing a method to estimate the probability of finding significant new information, with modeling and data indicating low probability for moderate Recall levels.
In eDiscovery, a party to a lawsuit or similar action must search through available information to identify those documents and files that are relevant to the suit. Search efforts tend to identify less than 100% of the relevant documents and courts are frequently asked to adjudicate whether the search effort has been reasonable, or whether additional effort to find more of the relevant documents is justified. This article provides a method for estimating the probability that significant additional information will be found from extended effort. Modeling and two data sets indicate that the probability that facts/topics exist among the so-far unidentified documents that have not been observed in the identified documents is low for even moderate levels of Recall.