According to a poll of 104 participants in yesterday’s eDiscovery Today webinar, keyword search is still used by 95 percent of them!

The poll question was conducted during yesterday’s webinar hosted by eDiscovery Today titled Looking for Validation: Evaluating Methods for Review in eDiscovery Today, where I discussed the different methods of review (i.e., keyword search/manual review, TAR/predictive coding and generative AI) and the considerations for evaluating each method of review.

I wanted to see what combination of methods the audience uses to facilitate review, so I asked a question at the beginning of the webinar, as follows:

What approach(es) does your organization use to facilitate eDiscovery review for ACTUAL CASES? (Note: “TAR” = Predictive Coding)

1. Keyword search in all cases (never use TAR or GenAI)
2. Keyword search and/or TAR (never use GenAI)
3. Keyword search and/or GenAI (never use TAR)
4. Keyword search and/or TAR and/or GenAI
5. TAR in all cases (never use keyword search or GenAI)
6. TAR and/or GenAI (never use keyword search)
7. GenAI for all cases (never use keyword search or TAR)

The goal was to find out what combination of approaches people use to facilitate review across their case portfolio – but only for review (not ECA or other workflows), and only for actual cases, not tests or proof of concepts. I also wanted to make it clear that by “TAR”, I meant a predictive coding method like TAR 1.0 or CAL (some people consider all of this to be “TAR”).

One of the attendees commented that it was a confusing poll question – hey, you may be right! 😉

Nonetheless, I asked the poll question, and I got 104 responses out of 150 people attending at the time of the poll (ultimately, 185 people attended the webinar, so perhaps I should have asked it a little later in the presentation). I intentionally made it an optional question as I knew the question wouldn’t be applicable to some attendees because they are not actively involved in reviews.

And here are the results:

The largest group was the group that said they use all three approaches – keyword search, TAR and GenAI – at least some of the time at 37%. The next highest group said they use keyword search and TAR at least some of the time (32%), followed by the group that still only uses keyword search (24%). Those three groups account for 93% of total respondents.

When you add in the 2% of respondents who use keyword search and GenAI (but never TAR), that means that keyword search is still used by 95% of poll respondents! 🤯

That leaves 5% that selected either TAR and/or GenAI (3%) or GenAI for all cases (2%). Nobody uses TAR only in their cases.

If you add together all the groups that use GenAI at least some of the time, that’s 44%. But if you add together all the groups that use TAR at least some of the time, that’s 72%.

Progress crawls on! 😉

If you didn’t get a chance to check out the webinar, it’s available for on-demand viewing on our YouTube channel here. I experienced a handful of rookie mistakes (including a 15 second pause at the beginning of the recording, and a mistaken belief that turning off my video would hide my speaker frame in the top right corner of the screen).

The funniest rookie mistake is around the 3:50 mark when I noted that several hands had been raised and asked for people to drop a note in the chat as to what was going on – only to find out that I hadn’t enabled chat for the audience (that’s why they were raising their hands). You get several seconds of me fumbling to find the right control to turn it on. 🤣

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that keyword search is still used by 95% of the poll respondents? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Microsoft Designer, using the term “robot lawyers looking at a pie chart on a screen”.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.