Technology: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out, said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don't.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company's lawyers did in the 1980s and '90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss, he said.

For more, see Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software by John Markoff, March 4, 2011 at NYTimes.com.