“Quality…you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! … Obviously some things are better than others … but what’s the “betterness”? … So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?”
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ralph Losey has once again graciously given over his column to me – and so this week I wish to use this platform to share a few personal, informal thoughts on the “hardness” of the problem of e-discovery search. I also wish to shamelessly “hawk” the June 6, 2011, DESI IV workshop in Pittsburgh — intended to be a high-level exploration of what should or could be future e-discovery standards governing the search for electronic evidence. Even if you choose to skip reading the rest of this blog, please note: all devotees of Ralph’s column are warmly welcomed to submit papers to DESI IV.
Robert Pirsig spent a good deal of time on his motorcycle in the 1970s contemplating the metaphysics of quality. In my own way, I’ve been on a similar quixotic mission for at least the past eight years — in search of “quality” in the e-discovery search space. This particular quest for the Holy Grail has involved seeking out the perfect search where one finds “just” highly relevant documents in response to a FRCP 34 document request, or, as a matter of early case assessment, “just” the hot documents one needs to win the case. I’ve searched the world over for answers, and along the way decided that I had been asking the wrong question.
At one time, I thought I knew what the problem was, and what the information retrieval “task” should be to overcome the problem. The problem, I thought, was simply the naïve use of keywords. Or at least, the way lawyers naively think about keywords when going about the task of searching for electronic evidence. I think many lawyers still practice with the assumption that using simple keywords, without more, to find responsive ESI is sufficient to get them through the day in dealing with their e-discovery obligations. While this remains a problem, it is not in my view the problem. And the task is not simply to try to “beat Boolean” with other search methods.
When I started thinking about this back in the Dark Ages (no, not those Dark Ages, I mean before the 2006 Rules changes), I was convinced that there “must” be a better method out there that reliably beat the kind of keyword and Boolean searches that lawyers used. My views were formed after being tasked to search through a “mere” 20 million presidential emails from the Clinton era in search of “tobacco”-related documents of relevance in US v. Philip Morris (still-active litigation pending in federal district court in D.C. on remand from the Supreme Court). After dreaming up an arbitrary set of keywords, and running a search that initially produced 200,000 hits but ultimately yielded 100,000 relevant documents after a six month document review exercise conducted by 25 archivists and lawyers, I understood that the profession was facing a crisis point. Simply put, the exponentially increasing volume of information would soon render impossible the task of manually sifting though 1% of unimaginably large volumes of electronically stored information (ESI). Not just costly, resource-intensive and woefully inefficient, but simply impossible, given real-world constraints.
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Source: e-discoveryteam.com
By: Jason R. Baron (Guest Post)
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