Dancing with the AI Devil: Investigating the Partnership Between Lawyers and AI

In due diligence, lawyers are tasked with reviewing a large set of legal documents to identify documents and portions thereof that may be problematic for a merger or acquisition. In an effort to aid users to review more efficiently, we sought to determine how document-level clustering may help users of a due diligence system during their workflow. Following an iterative design methodology, we conducted several user studies with different versions of a document-level clustering feature consisting of three distinct phases and 27 users. We found that the interface should adapt to a user’s understanding of what “similar documents” means so that trust can be established in the feature. Furthermore, the ability to negotiate with the underlying algorithm is facilitated by the establishment of trust. Finally, while the usage of this feature may be influenced by a user’s role, it remains primarily a project management tool.

In the TREC Total Recall Track (2015-2016), participating teams could employ either fully automatic or human-assisted (“semi-automatic”) methods to select documents for relevance assessment by a simulated human reviewer. According to the TREC 2016 evaluation, the fully automatic baseline method achieved a recall-precision breakeven (“R-precision”) score of 0.71, while the two semi-automatic efforts achieved scores of 0.67 and 0.51. In this work, we investigate the extent to which the observed effectiveness of the different methods may be confounded by chance, by inconsistent adherence to the Track guidelines, by selection bias in the evaluation method, or by discordant relevance assessments. We find no evidence that any of these factors could yield relative effectiveness scores inconsistent with the official TREC 2016 ranking.