EDD: Searching for What Matters The volume of e-data subject to discovery continues to grow -- seemingly exponentially. As courts, parties and litigators become more conscious of the importance of this data and more adept at ensuring its availability during litigation and regulatory matters, managing the data has become a more significant challenge for the producing and requesting parties.
Clearly, the mandate is to discover better ways to find the "stuff that matters" in the most expeditious and cost-effective manner.
These days, that's more easily done than it has been in even the recent past. Achieving that goal requires modern litigators to assess how to best view, search, categorize and produce electronic data. Fortunately, evolving technology is allowing litigation teams to evaluate a variety of tools to help form the best strategy for digging through mounds of digital documents accurately and efficiently. SOME NUTS AND BOLTS
The standard culling processes for electronic data continue to improve.
De-duplication, for example, has evolved significantly to allow either party to quickly remove duplicates or near-duplicates from the collection, reducing the amount of information that must be reviewed. Objective searching with standard tools offering Boolean search operators has also become a common and acceptable approach for swiftly identifying likely subsets of the data that might be relevant or salient to a given issue.
Nonetheless, both of these technologies are limited and they really do nothing more than mitigate the trend toward ever-larger databases and the relentless growth in pain, schedule and cost.
The last year or so has seen a considerable increase in the availability of higher-end search and categorization tools that promise to dramatically alter how lawyers review documents. These offerings vary greatly in function, the problems they purport to solve and how they integrate into the review process, but they have one thing in common -- a focus on using sophisticated technology to provide a true leverage proposition to the lawyers involved in document review. Although the products and vendors are too numerous to mention, several represent this aspect of e-discovery. SYNGENCE'S SYNTHETIX Syngence Synthetix uses natural-language processing intelligence to help lawyers find documents in vast databases that match an issue or concept they've found in another document or that they've simply posited themselves. Synthetix ranks documents by how relevant they appear to be to the search and can assist lawyers in finding relevant documents or ensuring that the privilege isn't inadvertently waived. The product integrates transparently into many litigation databases and is easy for lawyers to use. They simply highlight the information that is pertinent, and finding matches is a mouse-click away. KROLL ONTRACK'S ELECTONICDATAVIEWER Kroll Ontrack's ElectronicDataViewer is an innovative online repository and review tool that gives litigation teams the power to conceptually search a document set. Concept searching uses sophisticated technology to define the meaning behind the search terms by finding word patterns and occurrences in documents and translating them into "concepts." Then, the engine examines the relationships between the concepts, and every other word in the data set, returning top-ranked documents with the strongest conceptual relationship. With concept searching, litigation teams are more likely to find documents relating to the issues in their cases, because the search is not limited to the words entered in the query box.
The tool also contains a "find similar documents" feature that allows attorneys to locate similar documents once a relevant document is identified. After concept searching, users can review electronic documents in their native file formats and promote selected documents to TIFF images, enabling them to control discovery costs. MERRILL CORP./ATTENEX PATTERNS Attenex Patterns is based on sophisticated concept-mapping technology to analyze the document collection, identify relevant information and group documents based on the concepts contained in the collection. Native files are loaded, culled and then analyzed by the system, and then presented to end users in a visual index or map of related documents. A constellation metaphor is used to present the information, with documents presented in groupings on the screen, and with mouse movements yielding information about the groups, and allowing quick access and review of the respective documents. The technology is very interesting, visualization is novel and it purports to offer huge returns, allowing lawyers to review documents many times faster than with traditional approaches. H5 TECHNOLOGIES
Clearly, one of the most exciting new entrants is H5 Technologies, which has an offering that blends services and powerful technology. First, issues in a case are articulated at a granular level by H5 and the lawyers involved. Then, H5 uses its technology to quickly identify documents that meet the subjective issues in the case.
What's most exciting about this offering is that it not only identifies the relevant documents and categorizes the documents according to the issues, but it also provides a "flash text" summary of the portion of the respective documents that are relevant to the individual issues. A key advantage of the H5 approach is that this information is then easily integrated into the litigation-support package of choice. Lawyers are then presented only the relevant data, organized by the subjective issues, with a summary of the portion of the documents that apply. FIOS ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY SERVICES
This company is essentially technology-agnostic. Fios focuses on the business problem of discovery response. Is electronic discovery an unstructured data-management problem? Sure. Is it a reactive and proactive compliance problem? Sure. However, at its core, it requires a process orientation in which technology is only as good as the business process driving its use.
Anyone sorting possible partners for e-discovery must sort and ask some questions:
What is the production strategy?
Is that production strategy driving the document-review strategy and associated use of search technology?
What is the business process for determining privilege and relevancy criteria?
Is the process sensitive to the balance between risk and cost that lawyers get paid to manage?
Many technologies function as great searching engines, but without a business-process context to make them useful, they're like REO Speedwagon coming to Eugene, Oregon, hoping to croon some swell tunes, but without a retro music festival to help draw the crowds.
CRICKET TECHNOLOGIES' NEW CRICKET BOX
Survivors know the importance of having a range of tools to manage e-discovery challenges and the flexibility to choose which tools make the most sense for your case. Cricket Technologies' Cricket Box is designed to allow maximum control and flexibility in handling e-discovery with predictable costs.
Cricket Box is a very easy-to-use software/hardware appliance that provides the user with a powerful enterprise version of SQL that can handle large projects in less time and with more options. It can be deployed anywhere and can be used as a standalone to avoid the risks of putting unknown data on your network or connect to a network. Beta testers have agreed that the appliance is very user-friendly, which means it requires very little training and can start working without IT-staff support.
Cricket Box works with all common litigation-support applications and handles all file types typically encountered in business litigation and processes on the fly. In one step, you get extracted text, extracted metadata and the ability to export in any file format (TIFF, PDF, and HTML).
Cricket Box offers a configuration manager that allows the user to control many display options for common file types. For example, you can control in Excel spreadsheets, whether to reveal or hide columns and rows, display gridlines and headers, or what the page orientation and printing features should be.
The new Cricket product also gives metrics and reports that can be helpful in controlling costs and making accurate discovery representations.
In summary, significant developments in e-discovery in the last year seem to be those that address the most pressing need -- finding the "stuff that matters."
When faced with complex or multifaceted litigation, practitioners should carefully consider how technology can help locate and categorize relevant information.
I hope you found this helpful.
