Predictive Coding for Dummies

Published by Recommind and Wiley
December 2012
Free
ISBN: 978-1-118-52167-0

And by Symantec and Wiley
Author: Matthew Nelson
December 2012
Free
ISBN: 978-1-118-48198-1

There are some fairly odd characters in northern California. San Francisco is, after all, a city where the local authorities spent years being so blasé about public nudity that they eventually had to legislate against the practice because so many of the local denizens were wandering around naked.
It is perhaps unsurprising then, that San Francisco and its neighbouring Silicon Valley to the south have spawned perhaps the most bizarre publishing war of any festive season.
Predictive coding is the type of dinner party conversation that would cause most well-adjusted humans to drift into a coma. But two sets of boffins – San Francisco’s Recommind and Symantec from Mountain View -- have released rival pamphlets on the subject in a bid to make it more digestible for lawyers, and, one imagines, to boost sales of their own software packages.

Sharp and succinct

So far, nothing much unusual, apart from the fact that both pamphlets have the same crazy title – Predictive Coding for Dummies -- and both are published by the same traditional and venerable London legal publisher. Recommind has gone for the short, sharp, succinct technique, keeping its primer down to a tight 28 pages. Symantec, on the other hand, has thrown in the kitchen sink, stringing the dummy instructions out to a massive 44 pages.
However, Symantec has taken the brave decision to attach a named author to its tome. According to the publishers, Matthew Nelson is an ‘attorney and legal technology expert with more than a decade of experience helping organisations address electronic discovery, regulatory compliance, and other information-governance-related challenges’. Feel that coma coming on yet?
While rival Recommind adopts the anonymous author approach, it does boldly state up front that predictive coding, as explained by its pamphlet, will ‘reduce e-discovery costs by 50-90 per cent’. But then Recommind is a self-acknowledged proselytiser of predictive coding, claiming to have been preaching the good word for about five years, which in tech time is tantamount to millennia.

Quietly mad

In reality, both publications distil into bite-sized chucks the finer elements of predictive coding – which, for those who are interested, is a means by which a software package scans thousands of pages for key words and phrases, so that law firms in the midst of litigation don’t have to employ hordes of paralegals, trainees or even junior associates to sit in dark rooms with lots of boxes quietly going mad.
But sadly neither achieves that distillation with much of a sense of humour, which is the least one would expect of publications bearing the same cover artwork drawing of a funny chap with big bug eyes and silly hair. A few jokes wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Nonetheless, one could do worse this Christmas – indeed, either of these pamphlets is probably a better bet than many of the countless cookery books and badly ghost written autobiographies of minor celebrities on offer. True to their futuristic content, both e-pamphlets can be downloaded on line.