a new rule Plenty of commercial litigants are already using technology to help them breeze through potentially labor-intensive tasks such as weeding out irrelevant documents via predictive coding or threading emails for easier reading. But unlike the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which has developed a substantial volume of case law bringing e-discovery proficiency to the bar—much of it authored by recently retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck—New York state courts have provided precious little guidance on the topic. Document review is generally the priciest portion of litigation, accounting for about 73 percent of litigation costs, according to a 2012 RAND study. The new rule, proposed by the Commercial Division Advisory Council and approved on Thursday by Lawrence Marks, the state court system's chief administrative judge and himself a former Commercial Division jurist, would fill the gap in the rules, said Elizabeth Sacksteder, a Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner and member of the advisory council. Under the new rule, parties are encouraged to use the most efficient means to review documents and electronically stored information and to confer with opposing parties throughout their cases about the technology-assisted methods they intend to use in the case. Muhammad Faridi, a commercial litigator and a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, said that using technology-assisted review is nothing new to most practitioners in the Commercial Division, but it is “revolutionary” for the courts to adopt a rule encouraging its use. The new rule, Faridi said, could signal to litigants that, in the face of competition from the Delaware Court of Chancery and the Southern District as forums for high-stakes commercial disputes, the Commercial Division is more than sophisticated enough to take on their cases. “I think it's just another effort by the Commercial Division to let everyone know out there in the business litigation world that we have the rules and the know-how to deal with and handle complex commercial cases in an efficient manner,” Faridi said.