Ride the Lightning

The Battle Against COVID-19: How E-Discovery Software is Playing a Role

July 23, 2020

In our most recent Digital Detectives podcast, we were fortunate to have as our guest Maura Grossman, J.D., Ph.D., a research professor at the University of Waterloo, an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, and principal at Maura Grossman Law, an eDiscovery law and consulting firm in Buffalo, New York.

We hadn't a clue that technology-assisted review (TAR), traditionally used by lawyers to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant case information, is now being used in the fight against COVID-19. Maura and her partner Gordon Cormack are helping medical researchers find the information they need to accelerate progress in the study and treatment of COVID-19.

How much does it accelerate progress? Astonishingly, Maura and Gordon can, by using TAR, do systematic reviews that used to take a year in two weeks. Yup, you read that right. Here's a snippet of what Maura explained to us:

"It's really been great working with the research team. They're actually very happy with the results. What they did in the past was they would apply keywords to the abstracts of studies contained in these multiple huge databases to find potentially relevant studies. Then they would have a medical researcher review the abstracts of each study to determine if the study was potentially relevant, and if so they pulled the entire article which usually incurred some kind of fee and then the doctor would read the whole study to determine whether it met certain criteria and should be included in the meta-analysis.

This task is typically called Systematic Review and it normally can take a year or more to do, because the keyword searches are very over-inclusive, the databases are constantly being updated with new studies every day and not all of the studies are in English, but using TAR Gordon and I were able to assist the team in doing what's called the rapid systematic review that took us about two weeks and so as you can imagine they were thrilled to be able to do the same work at a higher quality in a fraction of the time."

Kudos to Maura and Gordon for all they have (and will) accomplish. It was downright inspiring to listen to Maura – we thank her again for joining us!

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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