eDiscovery Navigator

Search at the heart of e-discovery review
by KM World

LexisNexis Legal & Professional has released a significant new version of Concordance Evolution, the company’s fully installed enterprise review software product for electronic discovery and litigation document management. The new release is completely Web-enabled, allowing for efficient implementation and deployment.

LexisNexis emphasizes the following capabilities in the latest version of Concordance Evolution:

Speed--The new version combines professional insight on relevant language, keywords and terms of art, with the speed of sophisticated search technology to deliver fast searching, review, etc. In real-world testing, the software imported load files of 350 GB (approximately 7 million documents) within 24 hours, enabled document-to-document browsing within 1 to 2 seconds, tagged 3,000 documents per minute, returned results on complex searches within four seconds and produced 5 million pages of discoverable documents per 24-hour time periods.

Study Finds that E-Discovery Using Enterprise-Wide Search Improves Results and Reduces Costs

Study Finds that E-Discovery Using Enterprise-Wide Search Improves Results and Reduces Costs

"ZL Technologies (http://www.zlti.com), the leader in archiving and e-discovery software for the large enterprise, has published a scientific paper in the Proceedings of the 18th NIST/Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which details a significant gap in efficiency between traditional custodian-search and enterprise-wide search in e-discovery settings. The results demonstrate that organizations relying solely upon custodian-search are basing important legal decisions on incomplete information, which can lead to potential cost overruns and court sanctions.

ZL conducted this research using two separate evaluation teams working with the TREC Enron corpus of documents -- a volume of approximately 3,000,000 emails from more than 100 Enron employee mailboxes. The team using the custodian approach for searching the TREC documents failed to identify 84 percent of the responsive documents, and only identified four relevant custodians. In contrast, the enterprise-wide search team identified all responsive documents across 77 relevant custodians. The scope of enterprise-wide search enhances the ability of legal teams to find critical evidence that may influence legal strategy, particularly when counsel is determining whether to fight or settle a matter."

Enterprise Search: Rely On Strategy, Not Keywords

Enterprise Search: Rely On Strategy, Not Keywords

"Enterprise search is all about the ability to find an organization’s electronic information wherever, or however, it may be stored. Much as an Internet search tool is designed to search the World Wide Web for relevant websites, enterprise search is intended to give a company’s employees the ability to recall key information from internal documents, emails, databases, and more. Sounds simple, right?  Unfortunately, enterprise search is anything but simple.

“Many organizations have attempted to provide enterprise search by relying on a federated search infrastructure,” says Alex Marshall, VP of technology for Autonomy Corporation. A federated search system is intended to enable users to search varied and numerous databases with one query. It is also intended to display the results of the search neatly packaged in order of relevance. While users dream of such a simple search engine in the enterprise, federated search has yet to prove itself as a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution."

Crafting a More Effective Keyword Search

Crafting a More Effective Keyword Search

"Federal Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm called for "careful advance planning by persons qualified to design effective search methodology" and testing search methods for quality assurance. "The party selecting the methodology must be prepared to explain the rationale for the method chosen to the court, demonstrate that it is appropriate for the task, and show that it was properly implemented," he declared.

Then federal Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck issued a "wake up call to the bar," excoriating counsel for proposing thousands of artless search terms:

'Electronic data discovery requires cooperation between opposing counsel and transparency in all aspects of preservation and production of electronically stored information. Moreover, where counsel are using keyword searches for retrieval of ESI, they at a minimum must carefully craft the appropriate keywords, with input from custodians as to the words and abbreviations they use, and the proposed methodology must be quality control tested to ensure accuracy in retrieval and elimination of 'false positives.' It is time that the bar -- even lawyers who did not come of age in the computer era -- understand this.'"

Wake-Up Call on Slipshod Search Terms

Wake-Up Call on Slipshod Search Terms

"Given the ubiquitous use of general purpose search engines such as Google and attorneys' routine use of legal search engines such as Westlaw and LexisNexis, it is perhaps surprising that lawyers frequently falter in formulating search terms, or "keywords," designed to retrieve relevant e-mails and other electronically stored information.

Nevertheless, courts have time and again confronted haphazard and uncoordinated search methodologies for ESI.

Evidently weary of deficient keyword searches, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck recently issued a self-styled "wake-up call" to members of the bar in the Southern District. Instead of attorneys designing keywords without adequate information "by the seat of their pants," Peck appealed for keyword formulations based on careful thought, quality control, testing and cooperation. "

Do Your Searches Pass Judicial Scrutiny?

Do Your Searches Pass Judicial Scrutiny?

"Electronically stored information is increasing exponentially, and bills from law firms and discovery vendors to deal with this vast sea of data escalate significantly each year. Jason Baron, the director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, believes that ESI is growing so fast that even with unlimited funds and human resources it will soon be impossible for humans to review these large document populations.[FOOTNOTE 1] Still, lawyers faced with potential malpractice claims and sanctions are loath to try new methods for handling the problem. It is time for change.

The traditional means used by litigators to address ESI is the application of keywords and Boolean search terms to identify relevant and non-privileged materials.[FOOTNOTE 2] While acknowledging that this method is unquestionably deficient, a recent article published in this publication concluded that "the available evidence suggests that keyword and Boolean searches remain the state of the art and the most appropriate search technology for most cases."[FOOTNOTE 3] We agree that, in a perfect world, if the parties can nevertheless meet and confer, and agree upon keywords to reduce the population to manageable proportions, the traditional judgmental method can be made to work. However, this is an imperfect world where plaintiffs and defendants do not always agree, and are not always equally motivated, to reduce costs. In fact, it is often quite the opposite. Moreover, even where the sides use judgmental sampling to agree upon keywords, the costs nevertheless usually remain too high."