What happened
A former stockholder of Graf Industrial, a special purpose acquisition company, brought a putative class action over its September 2020 merger with Velodyne Lidar. His search terms for documents from 2020 and 2021 would require the review of 125,000 documents. The defendants offered to review them with technology assisted review, and the plaintiff insisted on manual review. On 21 October 2024 Vice Chancellor Lori W. Will held that the defendants may use TAR if they are transparent about the process. She wrote that TAR reduces the set for human review and applies a more uniform standard than manual review with keyword searches. She added that a smaller set for manual review means lower costs for litigants. She quoted a 2012 federal ruling for the point that computerized searches are at least as accurate as manual review. These views rest on case law and commentary. The review had not run, and the opinion reports no result.
Sources
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Court document, by authors with no tie to the system.
Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (Vice Chancellor Lori W. Will). Berger v. Graf Acquisition, LLC, et al., C.A. No. 2023-0873-LWW, letter opinion of 21 October 2024 on the plaintiff's motion to compel, pp. 4-9 and 12.
Thus, the defendants may use TAR to reduce their discovery burden, so long as they are transparent with the plaintiff about their computer-assisted review process.
Details
AI system
- Workflow
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The plaintiff's search terms captured 125,000 documents from 2020 and 2021. Attorneys select and review a representative seed set to train the system. The system learns through iterative rounds of sampling and manual review.
Follow-up
- Conditions for replication
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The defendants are transparent with the plaintiff about the review process. Delaware counsel stay closely involved in the review and sampling. Human reviewers check documents that the program codes as non-responsive.
Entry details
- Sector
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Legal services / e-discovery.
- Purpose
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A vendor that the opinion does not name built the TAR software to find responsive documents after training on a seed set that attorneys code.
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Cite this record
Peter H. Vartanian. (2026). Delaware court lets defendants use TAR over a demand for manual review (AIBD-0992). Artificial Intelligence Benefits Database, edition of 1 November 2026. https://petervartanian.xyz/aibd/records/AIBD-0992.html (archived at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AADSII, version 7.0)