  In today's legal environment, lawsuits and regulatory investigations require
companies to embark upon increasingly intensive data-focused engagements to
identify, collect and analyze large quantities of data. When documents are
staged for review the process can require companies to dedicate an
extraordinary level of resources, both with respect to human resources, but
also with respect to the use of technology-based techniques to intelligently
sift through data. For several years, attorneys have been using a variety of
tools to conduct this exercise, and most recently, they are accepting the use
of machine learning techniques like text classification to efficiently cull
massive volumes of data to identify responsive documents for use in these
matters. In recent years, a group of AI and Machine Learning researchers have
been actively researching Explainable AI. In an explainable AI system, actions
or decisions are human understandable. In typical legal `document review'
scenarios, a document can be identified as responsive, as long as one or more
of the text snippets in a document are deemed responsive. In these scenarios,
if predictive coding can be used to locate these responsive snippets, then
attorneys could easily evaluate the model's document classification decision.
When deployed with defined and explainable results, predictive coding can
drastically enhance the overall quality and speed of the document review
process by reducing the time it takes to review documents. The authors of this
paper propose the concept of explainable predictive coding and simple
explainable predictive coding methods to locate responsive snippets within
responsive documents. We also report our preliminary experimental results using
the data from an actual legal matter that entailed this type of document
review.
