Tuesday 20 October 2009

Corporations increasingly use and retain information only in the form of electronically held data and documents. As a result, the production and sharing of information in legal proceedings will depend heavily on techniques for accessing, searching, organizing and analyzing electronic data -- the principal focus of E-Discovery. Large corporations may have terabytes of e-mail and other files spanning many years that are potentially relevant to a case. In response to a court order, an E-Discovery team must identify, assemble, individuate and categorize an organization's files, segregate all "privileged" material (which may be withheld legally), and deliver a minimally comprehensive and exhaustive set of data to the opposing party -- all in a relatively short amount of time. The techniques needed to accomplish such a task necessarily include search, clustering, classification, filtering, social network analysis, extraction, and more -- and no one of these is sufficient. Such requirements challenge our traditional models for search. In particular, the appropriate user models do not reflect the standard "web" or "enterprise" conditions. This presentation explicates the requirements and types of solutions that dominate E-D.