Disclosure Of Seed Sets: Required To Cooperate Or Protected As Attorney Work Product?

The reliability and accuracy of the predictive coding process depends heavily on the identity of the documents in the seed set (including documents deemed irrelevant), because the seed set is the primary source used to teach the computer how to recognize patterns of relevance in the larger document universe. Indeed, miscoding just a few thousand documents—mere kilobytes nestled among terabytes of data—could substantially alter the results of the predictive coding that follows. A biased seed set coding could lead to large swaths of relevant documents being deemed irrelevant, and a smoking gun could be missed. Recognizing the power of this relatively small bit of data, e-savvy attorneys seek to obtain as much information about their adversary's seed set as possible.