FTI Consulting Announces Predictive Discovery Solution

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Oct. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- FTI Consulting, Inc. (NYSE: FCN), the global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance their enterprise value, today announced that its Technology practice is launching Predictive Discovery, a complete and defensible solution that significantly reduces the cost and time of legal review. Predictive Discovery combines an interdisciplinary expert team with predictive coding software to help corporate and law firm attorneys review and produce documents for commercial litigation and regulatory investigations. With Predictive Discovery, legal teams have a one-stop shop for any predictive coding use, including prioritizing important data, eliminating irrelevant information and conducting quality control on human reviewers.

"Predictive Discovery is a more scientific approach to e-discovery. The world-leading statisticians at FTI Consulting helped design this solution for accuracy and defensibility. It enables corporate and outside counsel to utilize advanced technology and statistics to conduct discovery in a more accurate, cost-effective and satisfying manner," said Joe Looby, Senior Managing Director in the Technology practice at FTI Consulting. "The foundation of this service offering is a new technology and process that are easy to explain and are scalable. Predictive Discovery will serve the mounting and complex data challenges our corporate and law firm clients confront daily."   

As a complete solution, Predictive Discovery incorporates people, technology and process for cost-effective and defensible results:

• People: The FTI Consulting team works with corporate and outside counsel and/or subject matter experts to review a small subset of the document collection, coding documents first as responsive and second as potentially privileged.
• Technology: A computer model studies and learns from the training set. The software then assigns responsive and privilege scores to the document collection. And, using the unique analytics within Ringtail® software from FTI Consulting, legal teams can visually verify the results.
• Process: Developed in collaboration with FTI Consulting statisticians, key performance indicators such as recall and precision and the resulting coding decisions are monitored and verified in a multistep process using statistical sampling and verification by counsel and experts.

"Legal teams are eager to use predictive coding and reduce the overall cost of e-discovery, but they will only do it if it's defensible," said Barry Murphy, founder of the e-Discovery Journal. "Predictive Discovery from a trusted managed services provider offers corporations and law firms the expert workflow, statistical quality assurance and visual verification that can help ensure that predictive coding results are explainable and defensible.  The FTI Consulting Predictive Discovery offering wraps technology and human expertise into a complete managed service."

Because no two cases are the same, Predictive Discovery can be customized in accordance with the goals and requirements of the document review. This enables clients to use Predictive Discovery to assist in a wide range of tasks, including prioritizing documents in the collection based on relevance, culling out pools of largely irrelevant materials, cross checking manual attorney review and isolating key terms in a large collection of coded documents. 

The Predictive Discovery technology builds upon the company's large patent portfolio of machine-learning and classification software and leadership in helping develop The Sedona Conference guidance on search, statistics and quality. FTI Consulting clients can combine Predictive Discovery with additional offerings from the firm such as managed review, a secure corporate privilege library for predicting privilege, as well as ancillary services like international data collection to expert witness testimony.

FTI Technology is hosting a webcast tomorrow, entitled Predictive Discovery: Taking Predictive Coding Out of the "Black Box," to discuss the practical implications and application of predictive coding technologies. Attendees can register for the event here.

Predictive Discovery now is available for Ringtail on-demand clients. For more information on Predictive Discovery, please visit www.ftitechnology.com.

About FTI Consulting

FTI Consulting, Inc. is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance enterprise value in an increasingly complex legal, regulatory and economic environment. With more than 3,800 employees located in 24 countries, FTI Consulting professionals work closely with clients to anticipate, illuminate and overcome complex business challenges in areas such as investigations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, reputation management, strategic communications and restructuring. The company generated $1.56 billion in revenues during fiscal year 2011. More information can be found at www.fticonsulting.com.

SOURCE FTI Consulting, Inc.