EDRM's Project on Generative AI Establishes Goals and Welcomes Additional Contributors

MINNEAPOLIS, MN, USA, April 8, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), leading the way for global best practices in e-discovery is pleased to announce the Generative AI Project is actively recruiting contributors. Those with an interest in addressing Generative AI through a legal lens are welcome to join.

The project will be led by Co-Project Trustees Dr. Maura R. Grossman, Research Professor at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and Principal at Maura Grossman Law (Buffalo, NY) and Matthew Golab, Director Legal Informatics and R+D at Gilbert + Tobin (Sydney, Australia).

“We’ve spent the past year enthralled with the magic of generative AI, but now it’s time for a serious reckoning,” said Dr. Maura R. Grossman. “Let’s put on our scientific caps and put these tools to the test. Come join us if you are interested in objective examination rather than hype.”

The Project on Generative AI established by the EDRM is a collaborative initiative which will be exploring both the potential uses and challenges of applying GenAI techniques to various stages within the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (“EDRM”). The Project seeks the participation of legal professionals, academics, researchers, eDiscovery experts, data scientists, and others who share a common interest in the emerging field of generative AI (“GenAI”) and its implications for the legal community and industry, but through a distinctly critical and empirical lens.

“Since the launch of Chat-GPT in late 2022 and the significantly superior GPT-4 in early 2023, suddenly the use of AI in legal has gone from something that provided benefits as long as you invested the time and effort in carefully training and curating a model – meaning that it was very helpful but only if you carefully invested the effort up-front – to something that has immediate results in the form of generative AI, where enormous pre-trained models are able to produce text – and recently with the improvements in multi-modal models – audio, video and computer code, with very little effort, as you are now using a prompt window to have an iterative conversation with the model,” explained Matthew Golab. “There is immense potential in these models to have a dramatic impact in reducing human effort in large scale tasks such as in document review in eDiscovery, and we are very excited to be leading this project for the EDRM. We would welcome anyone who is interested in exploring this fascinating topic.”

The Project leadership has identified three goals for the Project’s initial tasks:

1. Developing a checklist for EDRM members (e.g., individuals, law firms, and other organizations) to use when considering the use of GenAI in their eDiscovery processes. The checklist will cover the key elements and questions that EDRM members should consider when developing, evaluating, or adopting GenAI solutions, such as the specific use case or purpose, validity, reliability, bias, technical requirements, data privacy and security, cost and efficiency, and best practices and standards.

2. The development of a standard framework for a benchmarking test akin to the MMLU or TREC (Meaningful and Measurable Legal Understanding or Text Retrieval Conference, respectively) for assessing the performance of large language models (“LLMs”) for use as part of eDiscovery systems. The test will aim to measure the ability of LLMs to generate relevant, accurate, and coherent responses in connection with various eDiscovery tasks, such as document summarization, query answering, issue spotting, analysis, and document generation. The test will also aim to provide a standard benchmark or method of comparison for different GenAI approaches and systems in eDiscovery.

3. A series of webinars addressing the topics indicated above as well as others. We intend to invite notable eDiscovery experts that are testing and using GenAI systems to talk about their evaluation and implementation efforts, as well as prominent data scientists and researchers from industry and academia. The webinars will provide an opportunity for members and others from the EDRM community to learn about the state-of-the-art and the future directions of GenAI in eDiscovery, as well as to exchange ideas and feedback.

The Project is seeking members of the EDRM community interested in working on the projects outlined above in the hopes of contributing to the advancement and adoption of GenAI in the legal domain, as well as fostering an open dialogue and a collaboration among the diverse stakeholders involved in eDiscovery.

Joining an EDRM project team provides opportunities to connect, network, and contribute to EDRM projects, sharing expertise with our global community. Comprised of a blend of corporations, law firms, software and service providers, governments, educators, students, judges and media from 145 countries across six continents, the EDRM community is tirelessly working to enhance e-discovery, privacy, security and information governance processes and standards.

"All contributors are welcome, all we ask is that you take your advocate hat off, we are looking for diverse perspectives and expertise," said Kaylee Walstad, EDRM chief strategy officer.

The drafting of this press release was assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM GAI and LLM Policy.

About EDRM

Since 2005, EDRM has been empowering the global leaders of e-discovery by creating practical resources to improve e-discovery, privacy, security and information governance. With an international presence in 145 countries, EDRM continues to provide leadership, standards, tools and guides to enhance best practices worldwide. For more information on EDRM and how to get involved in our global project community, visit EDRM.net or email us at info@edrm.net.

EDRM Media Contact

Kaylee Walstad
Chief Strategy Officer, EDRM
+1 612-804-3244
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