Gartner Humming the Proactive eDiscovery Tune with Five Step Process for Better Use of Enterprise Search in eDiscovery

Having spent most of my career assisting IT departments worldwide provide more business relevant support to their business units, I have been very interested in following the paradigm shift that is going on within the IT deparments and their bretheran in the legal departments as they collectively deal with eDsicovery.

If you read my Blog with any consistency, you know that I believe that eDiscovery is part of a bigger issue called Goverance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). And, if addressed from a proactive standpoint with ESI archiving and leading edge enterprise search and analysis from forward thinking technology organizations such as Orcatec and ContentAnalyst, eDiscovery will eventually become a commodity process.

And, although Gartner has not exactly said this same thing, it is nice to know that they are at least begining to hum this same basic tune.

The full text of the Gartner press release is as follows:

By the end of 2012, enterprises that fully document their search processes in e-discovery will save 25 percent on their collection processes, according to Gartner, Inc. Enterprises of all sizes, and those facing any number of legal actions annually, should have a simple set of practices to follow anytime they need to embark on an e-discovery process in the near future.

Although no single relevance model or cocktail of relevance models will be effective in the next five years, Gartner predicts that by 2014, lawyers and technologists will use a customary means of recording search processes in e-discovery.

"Addressing the ongoing challenge of the IT perspective of litigation management demands both that the technologies be acquired and that procedures for using them be established," said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Companies need to own the products that will be necessary for them to address litigation and understand that those products will not have the same positive impact unless they are supported by repeatable, effective, systemic processes for lawyers and IT to follow."

Gartner identified five guidelines to ease the first steps of addressing e-discovery for litigation:

Open communication wide, and include potential custodians. The legal team, or teams, and IT must be able to communicate throughout the process. At the first threat of litigation, IT and the lawyers representing any company or government enterprise should initiate a planned round of meetings as though the e-discovery phase of litigation were a project with phased deliverables and expectations.

Get a senior litigator involved immediately. High hourly rates are compensated for through effective decision making.Waiting for the final product to be ready for delivery to opposing counsel is a mistake. A senior litigator, engaged at an early stage, will be able to advise on what document and data sources should be searched and examined, how to structure initial queries and what information should be searched, and how to record processes so that they are more defensible in the case of an inquisitive judge.

Analyze the corpus of documents and data early.Understanding the underlying content of the case holistically will allow IT workers and lawyers to discuss meaningfully what the impact will be of any collection strategy. It will also give the senior litigator the ability to call whether the case should proceed or be settled.

Estimate the price scale for collection based on what it will cost to pursue strategies of different degrees of intensity. Budgeting the cost of collection will allow IT workers and lawyers to work together to determine a proportional expenditure on e-discovery that is proper for a case, given its significance and the financial exposure it represents.

Document your decisions. Terms and methods of querying them should be saved in a grid such as a spreadsheet file for simplicity. Lawyers, in particular, continue to hope for a specific means of conducting searches that would allow them not to examine search processes as granularly as they must now. However, for the immediate future, lawyers' involvement will be critical to achieve recall that will be acceptable to the bench and opposing counsel.

"Codifying these guidelines in order will further enhance efficient proceedings and improve the successful resolution of litigation," Mr. Andrews said.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Five Steps for E-discovery to Improve Search and other processes." The report was generated as part of the e-discovery workshop that Gartner conducted with leaders in e-discovery, such as Robert Brownstone, law and technology director at Fenwick & West LLP, at the Gartner Risk Management and Compliance Summit, April 29-May 1 of this year. The report is available on Gartner's Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=1060612&subref=simplesearch.

Mr. Andrews will provide additional analysis at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 18-22, in Orlando, Florida. In the session "Gartner Magic Quadrant and MarketScope: Information Access Technology and E-Discovery," Mr. Andrews will offer a visual snapshot of e-discovery's direction and maturity, as well as the leading participants.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world's most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. It is the industry's largest and most important annual gathering of CIOs and their senior IT leaders. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world's leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees' annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/symposium/us.

Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Christy Pettey at christy.pettey@gartner.com.

About Gartner:

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.

Labels: 2009 eDiscovery Predictions and Trends, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Best Practices, Enterprise Search, Gartner, GRC

posted by Charles Skamser @ 12:10 PM 1 Comments

The Fog is Lifting on Concept Search in eDiscovery

As I have been reporting on my Blog for the last 6 months, Concept search is becoming a very hot topic in the world of eDiscovery. Brought to the forefront by cases such as Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 2008 WL 2221841 (D. Md. May 29, 2008), many in the litigation industry as now moving beyond initial interest in conceptual search to wanting/demanding a more in depth understanding of the technology and the value proposition vs. legacy boolean and keyword search technology. Further, and in some respects in response to this new appreciation for conceptual search, numerous new pure play conceptual search technology vendors are emerging along with most, if not all of the robust eDiscovery vendors announcing that they now also have conceptual search capabilities.

Unfortunately, I believe that there is still tremendous confusion in regards to what conceptual search actually does and when it provides the best return on investment. Therefore, in an effort to educate the followers on my Blog, I would like to recommend a series of blog posts titled "Demystifying Concept Search in Electronic Discovery" by Will Uppington on the e-discovery 2.0 Blog. The full text of Will's post is as follows:

Concept or content search continues to be a hot topic within the e-discovery community. There’s a continuous stream of articles that discuss it. Some that point out the positive. Others that point out the limitations. The courts have also gotten involved in the discussion. Judge Grimm refers to concept search in e-discovery in Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 2008 WL 2221841 (D. Md. May 29, 2008). Judge Facciola discusses concept search in Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington v. Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, 242 F.R.D. 139 and other opinions. Despite (or maybe because of) all the commentary on this topic, I find that while a lot of people think that concept search in e-discovery is good, many are not fully sure of exactly what concept search is, and how it is practically useful in e-discovery. It’s pretty clear that after several years of commentary and hype, concept search has become something of a buzzword associated with many myths and misconceptions. In an effort to better understand what concept search is and how it can help in e-discovery, I want to dispel two of the most common myths I have heard.

The “Concept Search is Concept Search” Myth
The first myth around concept search actually revolves around what it is. In my experience, people tend to lump two different technologies together when talking about concept search: concept search and concept categorization. It’s very common, for example, to see commentators say concept search even when what they are really talking about is concept categorization. To make matters more confusing, people also use a plethora of other names including content search, content clustering or concept clustering when what they really mean is concept categorization.

So, what are the differences between concept search and concept categorization? First, let’s start with concept search. Concept search technologies find documents containing “concepts”. I think that the Sedona Conference’s “Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search & Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery“, provides a good definition of “concept” when used in a search context: “the combination of [a] query term and the additional terms identified by the thesaurus.” In other words, concept search technologies find documents containing a specified term plus additional terms with similar meanings derived from a thesaurus.

Concept categorization, on the other hand, is actually not a search technology at all. Concept categorization technologies do not “find” documents. Rather, they categorize or group documents based on their similarity. There are many different ways to group documents based on similarity. Techniques include statistical (which assesses similarity based on word frequency), Bayesian classification (which weights words differently depending on factors in addition to statistical frequency, such as where the terms appear in a document), and semantic indexing (which takes into account the fact that many words used in a similar context may have a similar meaning). It would take more time to describe these technologies in detail but the Sedona commentary has a good summary of these different technologies if you are interested in learning more.

As should now be apparent, these technologies are very different and using the same words to describe them is confusing. It’s why it’s not surprising that a lot of the users of e-discovery services and software don’t have a strong understanding of what these technologies are or what benefits they can actually provide in practice. Dispelling the myth that they can be lumped together is a critical first step in any conversation about concept search and how it can help in e-discovery. This leads us to a second myth, that Concept Search is better than Keyword Search. I’ll discuss this in my next blog post.

Labels: Conceptual Search, Enterprise Search, Inc., Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Judge Grimm, The Sedona Conference, Victor Stanley

posted by Charles Skamser @ 1:56 PM 0 Comments