E-Discovery in Australia: Part 2 – The Road to TAR Adoption in Australian Legal Market

Technology Assisted Review (often shortened to TAR) has been making inroads in most major litigation markets. The progress hasn't been as speedy as some would have liked, perhaps, but law is a cautious and conservative field and even technological advancements that promise to herald a new era of efficiency in legal discovery and document review must wait until sufficient precedent has been accumulated by those daring justices and judges who are willing to give technology a chance.

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History of TAR adoption in Australia

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Australia joined the list of countries formally endorsing TAR in its litigation process in late 2016 with a landmark decision in McConnell Dowell Constructors (Aust) Pty Ltd v Santam Ltd & Ors. Justice Vickery refers to precedent in UK and US (spearheaded by Judge Peck) and various studies conducted by e-discovery practitioners to show that TAR review is as accurate, if not more so, than human review, and vastly more efficient.

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According to this article, in 2020 South Australia introduced a set of Uniform Civil Rules that “provide standardized protocols for the exchange of documents in an electronic format for both simple and complex discoveries.” These protocols prescribe how data should be collected, processed and produced.

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The federal court also recognized the validity of TAR usage in electronic discovery and had previously provided some precedential guidelines for its usage and validation in Money Max Int Pty Ltd v QBY Insurance Group Ltd. TAR reporting criteria set forth in Money Max have been used in other Australian cases since, indicating that Australian legal system is trending toward standardizing TAR process and reporting requirements.

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Practical impacts on e-discovery workflows in Australia and APEC

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From an e-discovery provider perspective, this is great news, since standardizing technical requirements allows for streamlining and templating processing and production steps on our end, reducing costs for our clients and possibility of error. Additionally, having clear and uniform requirements for transparency in TAR lowers the barriers for entry into TAR adoption through creation of predictable workflows for law firms that are designed to match the level of exactness that is required by the courts.

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The degree of detail required in TAR-related disclosures also highlights the value that e-discovery tech providers and their data scientists bring to the table in ensuring defensibility of TAR workflows. One of the common issues that is often brought up in our conversations with law firms is the need for more guidance and counsel with respect to statistical aspects of machine learning and its validation and here at FRONTEO we have created our data science department to assist our clients with exactly that need.

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Keeping in mind the trends that we described in our previous blog post in these series, we think TAR-driven workflows are going to continue to gain prominence in Australian litigation market (and more globally, in the APEC region) due to the substantial benefits they confer to all of the interested parties in a case. We would expect that advanced analytics, in some shape or form, will become as ubiquitous as email threading in most e-discovery projects today.

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Source:

1. eDiscovery and TAR – Reforming Discovery in Western Australia
   https://www.lavan.com.au/advice/commercial_corporate_litigation/ediscovery-and-tarreforming-discovery-in-western-australia
2. The first Australian case to endorse the use of technology assisted review for discovery … and it won’t be the last
   https://kordamentha.com/insights/first-australian-case-to-endorse-tar-review

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オーストラリアでのTAR導入の歴史についてですが、まず2016年末、McConnell Dowell Constructors (Aust) Pty Ltd v Santam Ltd & Orsの判決にて訴訟プロセスへ正式に導入されました。Vickery判事はTARレビューが人間のレビューと同等以上に正確であり、圧倒的に効率的であると述べています。

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そして南オーストラリア州にて、2020年に電子文書交換のためのプロトコルである "統一民事規則が導入されました（こちらの記事）。また連邦裁判所はeDiscoveryにおけるTARの使用を認め、Money Max Int Pty Ltd v QBY Insurance Group Ltdにてガイドラインを提供しました。これはその後も他の訴訟で使用されており、オーストラリアの法制度においてTARのプロセスとレポート要件は標準化されてきています。

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これらの事実は、我々ディスカバリプロバイダーにとっても、TARの処理・作成ステップが合理化され、クライアントのコストとエラーを減らせる素晴らしいニュースです。法律事務所からのニーズに“機械学習の統計データと検証結果の提供、それに対するガイダンスや助言”がよくあげられますが、FRONTEOではクライアントのためにTARの専門家であるデータサイエンティストが在籍しています。TAR主導のワークフローは、訴訟の関係者全員に大きな利益をもたらすため、オーストラリアにて成長中のリーガル市場、さらにはAPEC地域において今後も注目されるでしょう。

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