Litigants often must review and produce electronic format documents in the discovery phase of a civil litigation. Given the explosion of electronic documents generation and retention, electronic document production can be very expensive. The opinion in De Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 23350 (S.D. N.Y. Feb. 24, 2012), recognizes and favorably regards a novel type of computer-assisted review as an acceptable alternative to search for relevant electronic documents.

The object of electronic discovery is to identify as many relevant documents as possible, while reviewing as few non-relevant documents as possible. Because of the high volume of electronic documents, parties often rely on keyword searches to cull the documents down to a more manageable volume for further manual review. Keyword searches must be carefully crafted to avoid being over-inclusive which results in a large number of irrelevant documents.

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