An AID for Avoiding Inadvertent Disclosure

When searching for evidence in civil litigation, parties to a lawsuit have the right to withhold some content on grounds of specific privileges that serve to foster socially desirable outcomes such as open communication between attorneys and their clients. As inadvertent disclosure of privileged content can adversely impact a client's interests, review for privilege is a high-stakes process that is most often performed manually. Because the circumstances in which privilege can be claimed are generally well defined, review for privilege is amenable to some degree of automation. This paper describes the design of an interactive system to support privilege review in which the goals are to improve the speed and accuracy of privilege review. Results are reported for a within-subjects study in which six reviewers with different levels of expertise examined email for attorney-client privilege or any other valid basis for withholding the content from release. Quantitative results indicate that substantial and statistically significant improvements in recall can be achieved, but no significant differences in average review speed were detected. Participants self-reported that the identity features exposed by the system were most useful to them, and that the present implementation of features based on content or date added no discernible additional value.