The loneliness of the long-distance document reviewer: E-discovery and Cognitive Ergonomics

The need to manually review documents in e-discovery imposes considerable overhead in terms of cost and time, and challenges the capacity for the legal system to perform ediscovery matters effectively. Approaches to this problem to date have principally focussed on improving search as a precursor to review. We argue that as a complement to this we should also consider issues of Human-Computer Interaction in relation to the review task itself. To develop this point we draw on data from our own case-studies of e-discovery which indicate that document reviewers would benefit from support in drawing together emergent document classes. By emergent documents classes we mean groups of related irrelevant documents and groups of related relevant documents which the reviewer becomes aware of during the review task. Many traditional review systems fail to assist the reviewer in this and so adversely affect cognitive momentum and, we predict, the efficiency and effectiveness of the task. In the light of this we discuss interface design approaches which might offer better alternatives, including a series of interactive information visualisations.