Tuesday’s LegalTech New York panel, “The New Frontier: Predictive Coding for Information Governance,” came out of the gate criticizing traditional records retention schedules. Warwick Sharp, vice president, marketing and business development at Equivio, compared the schedules to the game of telephone—in that a records retention officer is responsible for sending a company’s record policy all the way down the chain to a company’s last user employee (who is ostensibly responsible for labeling files in his own email with up to 300 categories.
If a company has thousands of employees and hundreds of policies, the impracticalities of such a process swiftly become evident, he said—and this is assuming that every employee is trying to follow the policy. The better alternative: predictive coding, he declared, arguing that a records retention expert can train software to label documents with categories. The goal: an automated process that is consistent, systematic and defensible.
