The Capital Area Paralegal Association hosted a “Tool Box for Electronic Discovery Case Management” seminar last week and Rainmaker Document Technologies was pleased to help sponsor and attend the event.  Geared towards helping CAPA members gain a deeper understanding of eDiscovery, topics ranged from very basic term definitions to advanced search and cull techniques. 

Rainmaker partnered with Ryan Murphy of Equivalent Data to present an alternative to key word and search terms.  Keyword searches have been a hot topic lately and Ryan’s presentation discussed the benefits of using metadata to make fact based decisions as opposed to relying on a list of search words.  With key word searches recently coming under fire for their effectiveness Ryan’s methodology does make sense – culling down your entire data set based on facts, not just where keywords lead you. 

This methodology is applied to the science behind NeedleFinder® Insight technology, part of the NeedleFinder® 3.5 release.  Along with the standard date filter and de-duping, Insight allows you to separate potentially privileged emails based on domain names – so you know you didn’t miss something.  No more searching for sender “John T. Lawyer” and missing something because it was sent from “JLawyer” instead.  After separating all potentially known responsive documents and internal communications, keywords can then be used to filter through all remaining external communications.

Rainmaker has been using EQD’s proprietary software for several years now and we are excited about the roll-out of this new tool.  If you are interested in setting up a demonstration – the power of this tool is much easier to comprehend while looking at it! –  please contact us at 512-472-9911. 

On the flip side, while new technology options are still developing, keyword search still have their place and Craig Ball delivered an interesting presentation on steps to improve the keywords search process.  He presented an example where attorneys and support staff were asked to draft a list of keywords that would pull needed documents from a data set they were very familiar with.  These attorneys estimated that the list they comprised would find 75% of the responsive documents.  In reality, their lists only hit about 20% of the relevant documents.  Now, in their defense, attorneys are not trained on how to create keyword lists.  You can rely on experts to help you devise a list but even those experts got that way from trial and error – learning what works and what doesn’t. 

So, if you are going to draft a keyword search list, there are some things to keep in mind: 

  • Keywords require input from the custodians – you need to know their “lingo”, how they talk, what abbreviations they use, etc.
  • Make sure you incorporate misspellings, iterations, variants and synonyms for your keywords
  • Know your search tool and how it deals with exceptions.  Spaces, numbers, short words – they all play into the mix
  • Keywords must be tested, revised, and tested again.  Make sure to sample the discard pile! 

Overall it was a great seminar and thanks to CAPA for letting us sponsor and participate – it was nice to get out of the office and sit in on the presentations.  It reinforced something I was already doing and I learned a few things as well!

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