A research project on e-discovery search finds people are the key
The Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track 2008 has completed a third year of technical research on how to use search technology in litigation. Over the years, TREC Legal Track has become a proving ground to test advanced search technology as applied to e-discovery tasks. In 2008, it also explored a different aspect of the e-discovery problem: the role of human beings.
TREC Legal Track is a litigation-focused research project that explores and exploits the limitations of search technology in litigation. The ultimate goal is to develop objective criteria for comparing methods of searching large collections of documents in civil litigation. "We've come a long way in the current state of the art in artificial intelligence, but we've just begun to recognize that humans, and not just computing power, are vitally important," says Bruce Hedin of H5, a legal technology industry researcher and a coordinator for TREC Legal Track.
The Legal Track compared the commonly used Boolean keyword search strategy, which uses commands like "AND," "OR" and proximity searching, to newer search technologies using clusters, concepts and probability theories to discovery content relevant to a legal dispute. Using a database of tobacco litigation documents and fictitious legal complaints as a starting point, Boolean searchers returned between 22 and 57 percent of all relevant documents. But it turned out that more advanced search technology wasn't able to do much better than Boolean searching.
In an attempt to overcome the deficiencies in search technology, such as the problems of recall and precision in searching large data sets, TREC developed an "interactive task," using experienced lawyers as "topic authorities" to replicate the role of a senior partner in discovery. TREC coordinators admitted that the project, which relies heavily on law students and volunteers, is still very different than real-world discovery. But they hoped that by introducing more experienced legal researchers into the process, it may help solve real-world discovery problems. "Very often what gets lost is an understanding that a search may return a document that may match the search terms used, but doesn't really match the claim being litigated," says Hedin. "We're not just trying to get better search results in the laboratory, but to meet the needs of attorneys in their daily practice."
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Source: law.com
By: Jason Krause
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