A Brave New ‘AI' World - Predictive Coding Technology Is Embraced By The Supreme Court Of Victoria

In a victory which extends to parties involved in complex, document intensive litigation, the Supreme Court of Victoria on Friday, 2 December 2016, endorsed the use of predictive coding in discovery. This marks the first time the technology has ever been approved in Australia in a Court process, and will potentially lead to big changes in the way parties conduct discovery in major matters in the future.

Predictive coding is software that is able to determine the relevance of a document by using the attributes of documents that have previously been coded as relevant by a lawyer. In a sense the lawyer will 'train' the software by marking documents as relevant and irrelevant in a sample provided to them until the software is able to establish relevance on its own.