Concept Search in E-Discovery: From Concept to Reality

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E-Discovery Insights 3 Clearwell Systems, Inc. To read more visit www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/ 1 Concept Search in E-Discovery: From Concept to Reality BY KURT LEAFSTRAND ON JANUARY 30TH, 2011 For years, concept search in electronic discovery has been like concept cars at auto shows: Cool. Slick.

The thing that everyone is talking about. But not ready to move to the assembly line and be put into production. Like a concept car, concept search has been based on a lot of good ideas and shown a lot of promise.

However, it has failed to move beyond a few edge use cases and reach mass adoption in the e-discovery market. Why is this the case? It 9s not been because it 9s an unproven idea or that the basic technology hasn 9t been available.

In fact, the core algorithm that underlies most existing concept search technologies has actually been around since 1988, when latent semantic analysis (LSA) was first patented by a team from Bell Labs. Over the last 20 years, dozens if not hundreds of companies have sprung up to apply concept search to the broad area of enterprise search and to e-discovery in particular. To understand why concept search has never taken off, it 9s ... more. less.

always interesting to look for parallels, and the parallel du jour is social networking. Readers of David Kirkpat rick 9s excellent book The Facebook Effect and (perhaps to a lesser, more fictionalized extent) viewers of the movie The Social Network understand that Facebook was far from the first social networking site (remember MySpace? You won 9t admit it, but I know you do). But, despite being several years late to the party, Facebook somehow took the core of the social networking idea and presented it to users in a way that really allowed it to ccross the chasm d to the mainstream market. In introducing Transparent Concept Search , Clearwell plans to help conceptual search cross that same chasm in e- discovery. In talking to customers over the last couple of years, we have found that there are unmet customer needs with existing concept search products that, once addressed, will really allow its use in e-discovery to flourish 3 and not just in a way that makes concept search marginally more useful, but, a la Facebook, makes it orders of magnitude more useful. What are these unmet customer needs? Ease of use: Historically, concept search has been relatively easy to use in the strictest sense of the word 3 you type in some terms that represent your concept, and you get a set of search results back, along with some related terms and/or clusters of related documents. Simple, right? The issue is that in most cases that 9s not what the user rea lly wants to do. Because concept search is inherently cfuzzy d, users want to be able to refine their concept based on the feedback that they got from their initial search. Concept search, just like keyword search, is an iterative process, and prior-generat ion technologies have not allowed for that form of iteration. In contrast, Clearwell 9s Transparent Concept Search allows concepts to be defined and refined in a way that is intuitive, visual, and (don 9t take my word for it, but try it for yourself) fun. Precision : Traditional concept search increased recall when compared to just keyword search, but it came at the cost of precision. The refinement process facilitated by Clearwell 9s Transparent Search addresses this issue by E-Discovery Insights 3 Clearwell Systems, Inc. To read more visit www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/ 2 allowing intelligent human input to guide the concept search process. You get the best of both the recall and precision worlds with vastly diminished time and effort. Defensibility: Even more important than ease of use and precision is defensibility. Defensibility, for those new to the ter m, isn 9t so much about whether the way the algorithms work is known and able to be understood. They are, and aren 9t that complicated. Rather, defensibility is about reasonableness: was the concept search a reasonable way of determining which documents are responsive? Without the ability to define your concept in an interactive manner, we believe that the answer has historically been cno d, making concept search nice in theory but unusable in actual legal practice. Transparent Concept Search promises to change that. The end result is a more defensible search process that yields both greater recall and greater precision, enabling users to more quickly analyze case facts, rapidly identify key documents that may have been missed, eliminate irrelevant documents, and prioritize the most relevant documents for review. Clearwell also provides a reporting and auditing feature to document your search, allowing you to improve defensibility by cproving up d what was done. Know how to optimize . Low cost: Finally, never underestimate the value of cfree d in helping meet the ever -important unmet need of cost predictability and control. Historically, vendors have charged price premiums (often substantial) for concept search. Trying to charge a premium in e-dis covery for something that doesn 9t fully meet the customer use case and isn 9t defensible, and it 9s a recipe for low adoption. However, provide a highly useable, effective, and defensible capability as part of the core functionality of today 9s leading e-discovery platform , and it starts to look very attractive indeed Know More on: Litigation software . Electronic data discovery .

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