Da Silva Moore was the first court opinion to approve predictive coding

In Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, decided February 24, 2012, Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck of the Southern District of New York issued what is recognized as the first US judicial opinion to approve computer-assisted review, also called predictive coding or technology-assisted review. Peck wrote: “This judicial opinion now recognizes that computer-assisted review is an acceptable way to search for relevant ESI in appropriate cases,” noting that before his ruling “no reported case (federal or state) has ruled on the use of computer-assisted coding.” Predictive coding applies supervised machine learning to legal document review: lawyers label a sample of documents and a model ranks the rest by likely relevance.