In a recent workshop that I attended, I had the privilege of sharing thoughts on the latest electronic discovery trends with other experts in the market. Especially interesting to me was discussing the provocatively titled paper, The Demise of Linear Review by Bennett Borden of Williams Mullen. The paper, citing several factual data from various studies, as well as drawing parallel to other similar anachronisms of the past, makes excellent arguments for rethinking how legal review is performed in e-discovery.
When linear review is mentioned, the first mental picture one conjures up is boredom. It has generally been associated with a mental state that is a result of repetitive and monotonous tasks, with very little variation. To get a sense for how bad this can affect performance, one only needs to draw upon several studies of boredom at the workplace, especially in jobs such as mechanical assembly of the 1920s and the telephone switchboard operators of the 1950s. In fact, the Pentagon sponsored study, Implications for the design of jobs with variable requirements, from Navy Personnel Research and Development Center, presents an excellent treatise on contributors for workplace fatigue, stress, monotony, and distorted perception of time. This is best illustrated in their paper:
Mechanical assembly, inspection and monitoring, and continuous manual control arethe principal kinds of tasks most frequently studied by researchers investigating the relationship between performance and presumed boredom. On the most repetitive tasks,degradation of performance has typically been found within 30 minutes (Fox & Embry, 1975; Saito, Kishida, Endo, & Saito, 1972). The early studies of the British Industrial Fatigue Board (Wyatt & Fraser, 1929) concluded that the worker’s experience of boredom could be identified by a characteristic output curve on mechanical assembly jobs. The magnitude of boredom was inversely related to output and was usually marked by a sharp decrement in the middle of a work period.
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Source: eDiscovery 2.0
By: Venkat Rangan
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