Dublin Autumn Conference Round Up

Last month, the Dublin team participated in three notable conferences which discussed advancements in eDiscovery, GenAI and cybersecurity. These meet ups provided a fascinating insight in how other clients and vendors are dealing with new technology and handling the complexities of our field. This article reviews the key takeaways and highlights from each of them.

The Dublin chapter of the Women in eDiscovery held its second meet up of the year. It was organised by our new Dublin Engagement Manager Rachel McAdams and featured Katherine Gillespie (Forensic Accountant, KPMG), Magdalena Wojnowska (Senior Operational and Project Manager, A&L Goodbody), and Clare Longworth (Community Enablement Architect at Relativity). The discussion offered a blend of perspectives on current challenges in eDiscovery from investigative, regulatory, project management, and technological viewpoints.

A highlight of the talk was when Katherine talked about investigating alleged malpractice and fraudulent activity. Katherine spoke about how data from various sources often requires to be weaved together to tell the story of potential business malpractice. Once data can be successfully integrating from various sources such as bookkeeping database systems, financial records, mobile chat data, light work can be made of the investigation.

Technology plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges. The panel highlighted case metrics and clustering and the potential use cases for Relativity Air. A significant pain point however, was the inability to effectively filter and drill into chat data sets. It's a subject that we have reviewed before in our CIRCLE meetings and for which WorkStream has been specifically designed to address.

Johnson Hanna held an informal event on the Future of eDiscovery on their premises in Dublin on the 23rd October. It featured Eugene O'Neill (Executive Vice President of Reveal), Andrew Harbison (previously Head of Legal Technology of Grant Thornton Dublin but now freelance expert witness) and Tom O'Halloran (Johnson Hanna). The discussion centred around GenAI, how it can be used and if it truly is revolutionary for our field.

Andrew Harbison is an author of several academic papers including "Unbiased Validation of Technology-Assisted Review for eDiscovery" in which he evaluated TAR\CAL methodologies, and is positioning himself as an expert in the topic. His perspective centred around the pragmatic application of GenAI and addressing any pitfalls or shortcomings in the technology. Eugene, conversely, was representing Reveal and was more enthusiastic about GenAI and what Reveal is implementing specifically. The two provided contrasting opinions with Andy advocating for more cautious implementation of the technology. Naive applications of GenAI have already caused embarrassing mistakes.

GenAI however is seen as key to addressing the fundamental problem of too much data. It is considered a 'life-raft' that will allow teams to keep up with technology. It was agreed that it can be used reliably for translations, summaries or to look up concepts, but that it is not ready to be used for review classification or privilege determination. TAR was approved for use because it was possible to explain and validate the algorithms in court. Currently, it's not possible to do this for GenAI. OpenAI has said that it doesn't need to know exactly how ChatGPT works in order to release their product. Such a black box experience is not suitable for litigation and Legal tech LLM providers need to be more transparent in the way their systems work. Guardrails need to be provided to mitigate any errors. Human intervention is still paramount.

PwC held a Global Cyber Security Summit at the end October. It was a 24-hour virtual event designed for the C-suite covering major trends in the cybersecurity and emerging technologies. The byline of the conference was "Bridging the Gap", a refrain that may be familiar to our recent CIRCLE attendees.

The talk "Deploying GenAI for cybersecurity programs", in particular, offered insights in how PwC and their clients evaluated and deployed GenAI. In their Digital Insights Survey, they revealed that 78% of survey respondents have increased investment in GenAI in the last year but that 40% of them lack trust in it. So, to bridge the gap, so to speak, the participants discussed strategies to onboard GenAI technology effectively. Even though ProSearch is in an adjacent field to cybersecurity, we are also exploring ways to integrate GenAI and the lessons discussed are just as applicable.

First, they advise that the organisation recognise areas where high value individuals do manual repetitive analysis that can benefit from automation. Second, identify personas and roles and recognise what tasks in their descriptions can be helped by GenAI. Together, the strategy may help in focus GenAI deployment.

Alternatively, they discuss that some clients have a 'use case' driven approach whereby they list 10 things GenAI can do and then test them individually in the organisation. Others still have stood up a GenAI platform and allowed the wider organisation to use it as a playground to test and R&D use cases.

The general consesus, however, is that GenAI can make life easier but it can't replace some manual interventions. Pit falls include lack of understanding and naive usage. They recommend deep testing to see how it responds. It is exactly the same warning that Andy Harbison spoke about in the Johnson Hanna talk and is a more sober consideration of GenAI. After all, the perfect blend for success is People, Technology and Process. No one part can survive without the others.