Introduction: In a perfect world, discovery would ideally be conducted by the senior litigator who is
responsible for developing and fully understanding all nuances of their client’s legal strategy. Of
course today we must deal with the explosion of electronically stored information (ESI) that
never is less than tens-of-thousands of documents in small cases and now increasingly involves
multi-million-document populations for internal corporate investigations and litigations.
Therefore scalable processes and technologies are required as a substitute for the authority’s
judgment. The approaches taken have typically either substituted large teams of surrogate
human reviewers using vastly simplified issue coding reference materials or employed
increasingly sophisticated computational resources with little focus on quality metrics to insure
retrieval consistent with the legal goal. What is required is a system (people, process, and
technology) that replicates and automates the senior litigator’s human judgment.
In this paper we utilize 15 years of sensemaking research to establish the minimum acceptable
basis for conducting a document review that meets the needs of a legal proceeding. There is
no substitute for a rigorous characterization of the explicit and tacit goals of the senior litigator.
Once a process has been established for capturing the authority’s relevance criteria, we argue
that literal translation of requirements into technical specifications does not properly account for
the activities or states-of-affairs of interest. Having only a data warehouse of written records, it
is also necessary to discover the intentions of actors involved in textual communications. We
present quantitative results for a process and technology approach that automates effective
legal sensemaking
