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Conceptual approach: New e-discovery search method emerges

By: dmc-admin//March 31, 2008//

Conceptual approach: New e-discovery search method emerges

By: dmc-admin//March 31, 2008//

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An employee is terminated from his job and sues the company for age discrimination.

The plaintiff’s attorney calls for an electronic rummaging of all relevant documents stored in the company’s computers for the last 10 years. A keyword search of terms like “discrimination” and “reduction in force” (RIF) results in more than 13,000 documents in need of review.

Though only a hypothetical scenario from an informative session at the 2008 American Bar Association TechShow, Washington D.C. Superior Court Judge Herbert Dixon said keyword searches often create excess “noise” in terms of results relevant to a case and can slow proceedings.

Concept searches are emerging as an alternative to simple word mining and Dixon expects the method to improve the timeliness of locating electronic case-related materials. Through a complex formula, concept-based searches are designed to retrieve the meaning behind a word and not just the word itself.

“It’s going to be a lot more beneficial,” said Dixon. “Generally with the amount of electronically stored information, it’s impossible to go through it all. If you produced everything with a certain keyword, it would take 100 lawyers 100 years and a case can’t last that long.”

Get to the Point

Dixon cited several legal technology vendors which are in the process of making concept search tools available to attorneys, including software search company Recommind, Inc., based in San Francisco.

Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s general counsel, estimated that about 30 percent of the American Lawyer 100 employ concept search tools, and said Recommind has nearly 50 firms nationally that use concept searches.

Currently, larger firms will get the most benefit from concept searches, said Carpenter, because of the grander scope of discovery.

“We have a customer using the tool in a series of cases with 15 different parties, so there is over a terabyte of information,” said Carpenter, the company’s vice president of marketing. “They don’t want to have to come up with 50 terms for each party.”

Typically, clients see between a 20 percent and 80 percent reduction in time spent on e-discovery searches using concept tools, said Carpenter, who added that the average cost is less than $1,000 a gigabyte.

Dixon said he expects that once concept search tools become more prevalent there will be a break-even point for firms. The nature of the case and the scope of discovery will dictate whether or not a concept search is necessary.

“If it’s an easy search and you know the keywords, that’s fine, but often times attorneys don’t know what they are looking for,” said Carpenter. “Concept searching allows for a much bigger margin for error.”

Go With What You Know

While attorney Todd H. Flaming acknowledged the rise of concept searches, he remains a fan of the keyword method because of its simplicity.

“I know what I’m getting,” said Flaming of Schopf & Weiss, LLP, in Chicago. “I want an e-mail that pertains to RIF plus discriminate. If I’ve got those two things, I don’t care if it’s on a different subject, I want to see it.”

Flaming also noted that he does not trust concept searches because he has no idea how they work.

Carpenter conceded to the complexity of the search method and said all of the software is currently proprietary, which means, unlike keyword searches, attorneys cannot perform the search on their own for free.

He said attorneys should do a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether or not a concept search will save enough time to warrant the cost.

“If keyword is free, then concept is certainly going to be more,” said Carpenter. “What an attorney needs to ask is, if a concept search that takes an hour, compared to a keyword, which takes three, will it be worth it.”

Flaming remained skeptical about the advantages of concept searches.

“There are people who will sell it up and down, but my preference is I want something I know I can control,” he said.

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