Defensibility certificate
A signed, machine-verifiable record of how a technology-assisted review was validated, including its sample design, confidence bounds on recall and elusion, and cryptographic hashes tying the result to the locked rubric, the models used and the audit log.
First used in We Ran a Blind eDiscovery Review with No Humans in the Loop
The certificate changes what a producing party must defend. Without it, the party describes a vague process. With it, the party can identify the exact rubric, sample, random seeds, strata, per-request counts, confidence bounds, elusion rate, model versions and audit chain.
In the isResponsive methodology it issues only after three conditions hold: each request clears the recall floor at a one-sided 95 percent lower bound, the discarded pile clears the elusion test, and active learning shows convergence. Hash invariants are checked before sign-off; if any fails, the certificate refuses to generate, and there is no override.
Counsel signs the certificate, which keeps signature responsibility under Rule 26(g) with the attorney rather than the software.