Winston Churchill said that, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  That famous quip neatly describes keyword search in e-discovery.  It stinks, yet lawyers turn to keyword search again and again, because it seems like the best option out there.  It’s the devil we know.

Though keywords serve us well when searching the web, they perform poorly finding “all documents touching, concerning or relating to” an issue in litigation.   The failure is particularly pronounced when keyword search is pursued in the usual fashion of opponents horse trading terms without testing them against sample data or adapting the list to ameliorate well-known flaws like misspellings, noise words and synonyms. Continue reading →

Native file review and production in e-discovery is a bit like evolution.  Just when you think the evidence in support would persuade anyone, up pops someone who’s firmly and vocally unconvinced.

When I’m extolling the virtues of producing native file formats in a speech or webcast, I sometimes get pushback like this: “Hey Craig, you’re always telling people to ask for native files.  Well, I think native production is slower and more expensive because it takes so freakin’ long to load each file into Word, and messes up the metadata.”

I’m dumbfounded.  I want to answer, “Wait a sec.  You’re comparing the review of a bunch of document images using an evidence review platform like Concordance to opening each data file in its native application?  Are you kidding me?” Continue reading →