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. (continued...)
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.
rticle Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/cyber-law-articles/electronic-evidence-information-gluttony-439748.html
About the Author: Article by Andrew P. Li
Mr. Li is a Litigation Support and E-Discovery trainer and consultant with over a decade of experience. He is the owner of APLCS, LLC (http://www.aplcs.com) and can be reached at
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