For about two years, a group of legal professionals from the EDRM at Duke Law School –judges, lawyers, e-discovery and litigation support professionals—from across the country have been working on guidelines designed to educate and inform the legal industry about technology assisted review.

The Technology Assisted Review (TAR) Guidelines have now been released and are available on the EDRM website here. The objective of the TAR Guidelines is to define and explain the TAR process, outline its utility in the discovery process, and not only demystify the technology, but also promote its increased use.

The TAR Guidelines have four chapters. The first chapter defines technology assisted review and the TAR process. The second chapter lays out a standard workflow for the TAR process. The third chapter examines alternative tasks and use cases for TAR. Chapter four discusses factors to consider when deciding whether to use TAR.

I am privileged to have been a part of the drafting team and the team of editors who completed the final paper. It was a long and arduous process, to be sure, but I believe we achieved as much consensus as could possibly be achieved given the scope and breadth of thought leadership in this space. In addition to the TAR Guidelines, EDRM will release later this year a TAR protocol that is designed to recommend best practices to accompany the TAR Guidelines.

The TAR process is revolutionizing the way we review documents in discovery. No longer is it necessary to have junior lawyers pour through the ever-increasing volumes of documents to be reviewed in discovery. Today, we use proven machine learning technologies to enhance the review process, make document review more efficient and cost-effective. For anyone in the legal profession who is not currently using TAR, the TAR Guidelines are a must-read.