Ride the Lightning

TREC Document Review Project – Recommind Asked to Withdraw

May 14, 2012

Law Technology News has reported the following:

"TREC Legal Track — part of the U.S. government's Text Retrieval Conference — announced last week that the 2012 edition of its annual document review project for testing new systems is canceled, while prominent e-discovery software company Recommind confirmed that it's been asked to leave the project for prematurely sharing results."

Several months ago, Recommind began spreading word that it received positive results in TREC's 2011 project and related documents were filed in the – what else – da Silva Moore case. LTN reported that the results were in fact mixed.

After the premature publicity, Recommind's Vice President of Marketing, Craig Carpenter, said "TREC didn't like that. They didn't think that it was appropriate. What they had asked was that we not participate in the 2012 test" (now not happening). "We didn't know if we were going to participate in 2012 anyway."

I just love that last sentence.

LTN reports that multiple sources close to TREC advise that Recommind is effectively banned from all future projects.

So what is with Recommind? It has garnered perhaps the least favorable public image of any company doing technology-assisted review. And yes, I use that term with a smile, which most readers will understand.

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