A project closes in on a protocol to improve e-discovery results
It would be the ultimate discovery for e-discovery: a perfect method to turn terabytes of digital data into a collection of case-relevant documents.
Three years ago, a handful of lawyers and scientists started the quest, a project to save litigation from being buried in an avalanche of electronic documents. Since then, the Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track has been using different types of computer searches to wade through huge piles of digital information, hoping to get closer to a complete picture of what is issue-important in a computer’s data stores.
The good news: The TREC Legal Track team believes it is close to finding a protocol that can work. The bad: The project also found disturbing problems with the way lawyers work today.
And the harshest conclusion: Keyword searching—what most lawyers use to find litigation documents—misses the majority of relevant documents. Or as Jason Baron, one of the Legal Track study coordinators, puts it, “Lawyers need to understand that the way they have been searching for electronic documents has some serious flaws.”
So as they search for a solution, the Legal Track team has tossed a ton of online documents, the efforts of academics worldwide and commercial e-discovery advisers, the skills of senior litigators, a lawyer collecting frog sounds and the ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein into the challenge.
And results are on the way.
DIGITAL DRAMA
Ever since bill gates turned into a whiny, twitching mess on the stand as his own e-mails were read back to him during the 1998 Microsoft monopoly trial, lawyers have known that digital documents—especially e-mail—are a key to winning cases.
But without improvements in technology, those “gotcha” moments might be hard to come by. Facing the prospect of monumental e-discovery costs, some lawyers may settle important cases, further reducing the number of trials. And mishandling e-discovery demands has cost firms millions in court fines and lost claims. In fact, it was a landmark case that spurred the creation of TREC Legal Track.
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Source: abajournal
By: Jason Krause
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