E-Discovery - How You Search Can Save Money & Time

The third of a six-part series on e-discovery from the Taneja Group .

There is a cautionary tale in the case of Metro Wastewater Reclamation v. Alfa Laval. The defendant in a breach of contract case requested that the plaintiff produce all electronically stored information (ESI) in reference to several of the plaintiff's employees. The plaintiff was to search for all relevant digital files from email, backup and archive, and fileshares. The plaintiff protested that the request imposed an unreasonable burden, but the court ruled that the request was highly endemic to the case and therefore reasonable. The plaintiff had to cough up the documents in an expensive manual search.

If Metro Wastewater Reclamation had run advanced e-discovery search tools against their content, then they would have lifted their own burden. In fact, today search and access is more critical than ever before for e-discovery, and the ability to do so proactively can be a key advantage in court. In the course of litigation, attorneys confer at the pre-trial Rule 26(f) stage to establish the parameters for e-discovery activities. Attorneys who are armed with detailed knowledge of what information will be generated by which e-discovery queries are better prepared than their opponents.

In the example of Metro Wastewater, a simple keyword search would have returned documents with the names of the affected employees. But they would be presented to reviewers as a large and unwieldy meaningless mass of files and email whose only distinction is that they reference an employees name. Document management systems, networked fileshares, copies of emails, active files, and archived files -- all connected with user names, all without context. However, if the plaintiff had been able to search in context with reasonable and demonstrable search terms, then they could have met their discovery burden faster, better, and much less expensively.

In the law office, advanced searches can be defined around content or metadata. Within content, it should be possible to search by terms such as names and titles, phrases, matters, and court cases. When it comes to metadata, basics like creation and modification dates remain important, but so do email relationships, email lists, and the existence of attachments. This is a critical function of e-discovery. However, remember that e-discovery is by no means restricted to email. That is emphatically not true: Many sources of ESI are fair game for e-discovery searches. The same goes for any specific content stores or applications like enterprise content management systems, databases, or specific storage arrays. All sources of ESI are potentially relevant to the e-discovery process, which cannot be limited to email or any other single data source.Contextual search can return results that are relevant to the query even if the exact keyword is lacking. With this contextual ability (helped along by a lexicon of industry terms) a compliance or e-discovery classification will be highly accurate. Other powerful e-discovery search capabilities include sophisticated natural language processing, drill down, and query refinement. In turn, this makes search easier to use and also helps large search teams collaborate by saving, exchanging, manipulating, and refining search parameters, metadata tags, and result sets. In contrast, more basic search tools focused on keyword repetition and popularity ranking are simply inadequate for searching through complex enterprise data. For example, Recommind Inc. combines concept-based search technology with a simple user interface for enterprise attorneys and compliance teams.

There is a large bone of contention between Google-like enterprise search tools and integrated e-discovery search tools: the ability to properly prioritize and review the result sets. Most e-discovery software platforms worth their salt offer this level of search, but would-be e-discovery customers are not always aware of the distinction between enterprise search and search that is optimized for e-discovery. Enterprise search presents a set of search results ranked by popularity for the viewer to decide what is relevant and what is not. But e-discovery search technology has the ability to act on the returned search sets -- such as moving data to a secure repository, marking it available for review or litigation holds, or presenting result sets for automated mathematical analysis followed by human review. This e-discovery distinction is far evolved beyond enterprise search in its ability to powerfully act on litigation search results.

Next, the third step in the e-discovery workflow: preservation.

Part one of this series can be found here.

Part two of this series can be found here.Christine Taylor is an analyst with Taneja Group , which provides research and analysis to the storage, server, and knowledge management industries.