Some of you have already read about this, but some haven’t, so I felt I should provide a heads-up on Sidley’s GPT-4 test in document review!

The high-level results of the test are captured in this article in American Lawyer/Legaltech^® News (Replacing Attorney Review? Sidley’s Experimental Assessment of GPT-4’s Performance in Document Review, written by Colleen M. Kenney, Matt S. Jackson, and Robert D. Keeling and available here).

To better understand the current capabilities of GPT-4 for eDiscovery, Sidley Austin collaborated with Relativity to evaluate how standard GPT-4 would perform in coding documents for responsiveness. The parameters of Sidley’s GPT-4 test in document review included:

• A prior, closed case in which documents had been coded by human reviewers for responsiveness. The now closed case involved a subpoena related to potential violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute. The subpoena requested documents that were responsive to 19 different document requests.
• A representative sample of these documents that reflected the richness of the total corpus of documents. It included 1,500 total documents from the closed case: 500 responsive documents and 1,000 non-responsive documents.
• They provided document review instructions for GPT-4 that mirrored the review instructions employed by the attorneys who had reviewed those documents.

GPT-4 evaluated each document individually, based on the review instructions, and reported whether the document was responsive according to a scoring system of negative one to four, as follows:

• -1 if the document could not be processed;
• 0 if the document contained non-responsive junk or no useful information;
• 1 if the document contained non-responsive or irrelevant information;
• 2 if the document was likely responsive or contained partial or somewhat relevant information;
• 3 if the document was responsive; and
• 4 if the document was responsive and contained direct and strong evidence described in the responsiveness criteria.

The experiment proceeded in two stages:

• Sidley provided GPT-4 with the same review instructions given to the attorneys and collected data on GPT-4’s performance relative to the human review;
• Based on initial output from stage one, the prompt for GPT-4 was modified to address ambiguities in the responsiveness criteria, which mirrored a quality control (QC) feedback loop that provided the same additional information given to the contract attorneys outside the original review instructions.

Once these experimental adjustments were made, GPT-4 performed well: 75.9% of responsive documents and 84.8% of non-responsive documents were correctly identified by GPT-4! Very respectable results!

There’s a lot more granularity to the results, including some of GPT-4’s limitations, how it compares throughput-wise to TAR and how it does on the little confidence, some confidence and high confidence assessments, but I won’t steal their thunder on the rest of the results. Check them out here. If anything, Sidley’s GPT-4 test in document review shows us that we may be closer to the mainstream use of generative AI tools for document review than we think!

So, what do you think? Do you think we’re close to seeing mainstream use of generative AI tools for document review? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robots reviewing documents on computers”.

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