Keyword searches not good enough for e-discovery, experts say

Lawyers are using old search technologies that don't find all of the relevant documents

Document dump." "Unsearchable morass." That's how Ontario Superior Court Justice Cary Boswell described the nearly 23 million pages of electronic records handed over by the prosecution in an ongoing criminal fraud case of three former Nortel Networks executives.

During a hearing last December, defense lawyers argued that the sheer amount of material provided on a hard drive -- the equivalent of 8,000 to 10,000 boxes of paper -- was so "staggering" and disorganized that it couldn't be effectively searched for information that might help the defendants.

In a ruling afterward, the judge agreed, ordering the prosecution to "re-disclose" any relevant material in a more organized fashion.

That case offers an example of the challenges legal professionals face with e-discovery. And those difficulties are compounded by the fact that typical computer searches don't find all of the relevant information in a data dump. For example, tests by the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), an international workshop that assesses various information retrieval approaches, show that Boolean keyword searches locate only 22% to 57% of the total number of relevant documents.

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Source: computerworld.com
By: Cindy Waxer