Quinns seek to ensure IBRC dispute does not delay action

The Quinn family are concerned to ensure a dispute over the method of analysing 700,000 documents for Irish Bank Resolution Corporation’s action against members of the family does not delay their own action against the bank aimed at avoiding liability for some €2.34bn loans, the Commercial Court has heard.

Mr Justice Peter Kelly yesterday fixed for hearing in October the application by IBRC for court sanction for analysis of the documents via Technology Assisted Review (TAR), a new form of analysis never before used in the Irish courts, rather than manual analysis.

Karyn Harty, solicitor for IBRC, said in an affidavit the TAR process is “very efficient and very accurate” and involved a computer ‘learning’ what document is, or is not, relevant from expert practitioners who code batches of randomly selected documents for relevance at the outset of the review. The computer ultimately builds a prediction model where it can predict what a human reviewer would consider relevant by giving a document a relevance score of between one to 100, she said.