Electronic Evidence & Information Gluttony

Posted by bechtom

June 13, 2008

Peter Drucker once said, “…The most important contribution…in the 21st century is…[the] increase productivity of Knowledge Work and the Knowledge Worker.”

Drucker recognized in the early 60s what has already proven to be true in the present age: US businesses would soon undermine themselves with information gluttony. According to the latest reports coming out of Berkeley, about 400,000 TERAbytes of new information is generated each year by e-mail alone. And yet, 59% of US companies did not have any e-mail retention policies. US Corporations spent $4.6 billion in 2005 to analyze their internal e-mails, but still 62% of these same corporations doubt they would be able to show that their e-mail records are accurate and reliable.

In this current age of the “Information Superhighway,” companies literally “do not know what they know.” And for attorneys who must review this avalanche of information (often from multiple sources) to ferret out “smoking guns” for a trial, this problem of information overload is much more compounded.

Our current methods of electronic discovery (the process of collecting and reviewing electronic evidence generated by both sides of a lawsuit) is limited by our present day storage and filing systems. Like the much revered Dewey decimal system, much of the data generated today is still classified using taxonomies, foldering systems based on categorizations and their relationships. One of the more visible limitation of this type of filing is that seldom would two people classify information in the same way. After all, what would be considered important by an engineer would probably not hold the same weight for an accountant. Would a letter regarding the purchase of a Microsoft license be filed under “Software”, “Budget”, “License”, or “Correspondence”? The answer will generally depend on the content of the letter and also the interpretation of the content by the reader.

And there lies the key word: content. In the current landscape of Legal Technologies, content and interpretation have become almost holistic. With information being piled and buried on top of each other, the ability to wade through and retrieve data based on content has become the latest weapon for an attorney or litigator. Electronic Discovery vendors, like Cataphora and Syngence, are now beginning to push the ability to perform content searching using linguistic pattern matching or profiling. Instead of folders or categories, documents will now be grouped and linked via the actual content contained within them. This provides not only a much more accurate retrieval system, but also takes away the limits of key word searching. A search for the term “Santa Claus” will now reveal documents discussing “Saint Nicholas” or “the Jolly Red-Suited gift-giver”. The technology that is now beginning to penetrate the legal market will allow computers the ability to relate information to each other with almost the same prudence as you or I. This allows searches to be performed not based on keywords, but based on an entire document or concept. A search for the word diamond, depending on the case or conversations involved, would yield either information on jewelry or possibly the game of baseball.

The impact of this new type of system is still being gauged. It stands to not only change the world of litigation, but possibly the way we conduct any type of searching, be it online or within our own hard drives. The underlying technology contains the potential to break down language barriers by reducing actual words to patterns or semantics. With such technology, even a photo can be used as a search base, pulling up similar pictures. It is the core item with which Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide-Web, hopes to push forth the “Semantic Web”, or as some have come to call it, “Internet 2.0″. And it is a technology that we will no doubt see more of within law firms in the coming years.Author: Andrew P. Li