Historical Essays

So what is a ‘white paper’? Wikipedia says that they are authoritative reports or guides on a specific issue, which sounds great. Just ‘below the fold’ on the definition we find that since the 1990’s ‘commercial white papers’ have become marketing or sales tools designed to promote a specific company’s solutions or products. I think that the eDiscovery market is cynical enough to understand the embedded perspective of most white papers. This bias or perspective does not invalidate the content of good papers, but it does force the reader to filter and interpret carefully. Don’t get me wrong here, I have contributed my share of commissioned white papers to the body of eDiscovery perspective. Every one was a bit of a struggle with the ‘client’ to keep my content free of market messaging. It was exactly this kind of ethical and professional conflict that drove us to create eDiscoveryJournal in the first place.

In early 2010, I said it would be the year of Early Case Assessment (ECA). Thankfully, the eDiscovery world was about much more than ECA; this was the year that corporations took a meaningful step up the maturity ladder. This is not to say that there isn’t work to be done. On the contrary – the first movement up the learning curve was a baby step, but a step in the right direction nonetheless.

Barry’s reflections on the 2010 market space got me thinking about last year’s technology trends. We saw a lot of privately developed review platforms rolled out with different licensing models, but I wanted to figure out what was fundamentally new and different. No. 1 ECA = ESI AccessWell before LTNY 2010, the marketing machines began to hype Early Case Assessment (or Early Data Assessment) as the new eDiscovery usage case for corporations and law firms. But what is the fundamental function that enables ECA/EDA? I posit that it is the ability of a relatively non-technical user to directly access ESI, whether in the wild or from a collection. This basic marriage of search indexing and a review GUI gave Clearwell a big jump on the market, followed closely by StoredIQ, Kazeon and a host of others. Effectively, we are foreshadowing the ‘death’ of processing as a separate EDRM phase. My main concern about merging processing into a one-click function is that it can over-simplify complex options and bury exception handling. As long as users understand the different quality requirements for Identification/Investigation versus the actual discovery request, ECA/EDA tools are here to stay.

As we head into “LegalTech season,” I would normally expect some hyperbole around not-so-well defined terms like “ECA” or “the cloud.” And while there is certain to be some marketing hype around the show, it feels like this year will feature more pragmatism. I expect to see more messaging around actual benefits that solutions have delivered and less “generic” messaging about how many additional features a platform or service has implemented.

Searching for a single term within a document is pretty black or white. It is either present or not. When you step up to searching based on phrases, proximity terms, concepts and compound term clusters things start to get a bit less absolute. Yet, simple lists of terms are generally either overly broad or are missing relevant ESI. The simplest search index does not store information about the position(s) of terms within a document. Modern search indexes such as Lucene, FAST, IDOL and others rely on term position and other information to derive clusters of two or more related terms (concepts) and relevance weighting factors. During a recent briefing call with Mike Wade, CTO of Planet Data, we delved into some of the challenges that Planet Data faced expanding their Exego Early Cost Assessment platform to support concept search and ECA workflow. What really caught my attention was the ability to extract two separate versions of the text from documents, both the raw unformatted text AND the rendered view. Alternatively, they have developed a merged rendering that embeds the extracted object text in-line with the viewed text.

Now that my full research paper is complete and available, I wanted to share some highlights. Just yesterday I had another GC client tell me that their IT department wanted to rely on their upcoming upgrade to Exchange 2010 to respond to discovery requests. Microsoft has added some good new features, but I would not want to try to defend their use against any kind of adverse scrutiny. So let’s talk about the new ‘Discovery Search’ interface. First and foremost, this is basically the old administrative multi-mailbox search within the OutlookWebApp. The search name and criteria are written to a database table along with the user, date, size estimate and some keyword statistics. The last is a good feature that was undoubtably driven by a customer request to support keyword negotiations. Here is a look at the landing page: