With the increase in use of AI and other technologies in legal practice, there are now technology-assisted document review processes that serve to assist parties preparing affidavits of documents. In the recent B.C. Supreme Court decision in Acciona Wastewater Solutions LP v Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District, 2025 BCSC 1256, the use of one such process called TAR 1.0 was reviewed by the plaintiff and it resulted in an affidavit of 4 million documents. The defendant objected, the model it used (known as TAR 2.0 that included an active learning process) resulting in an affidavit of 225,000 documents. The defendants allegations were that the plaintiff had simply undertaken a data dump.
Though the Court at paragraph 77 of the decision agreed with the defendant that …“’meaningful, reliable, and complete’ production should allow the receiving party to review the disclosure without the added burden of excluding an undue number of irrelevant or duplicative documents”, the plaintiff’s production was not a data dump. The Court earlier stated at paragraph 74, that the plaintiff complied with “…comprehensive document production protocol, applied agreed-upon search terms, and conducted an extensive review, both automated and manual, by lawyers with knowledge of the pleadings. It spent many hours and a significant amount of money to reduce a very large and complex document set to a manageable production. There is no evidence that it acted with the intent of obfuscating the discovery process or offloading its discovery costs onto the [defendant]”.
The decision itself is an interesting read on the use of currently available technologies to assist document review generally and when preparing affidavits of documents.