Stalking the Smoking Gun
Top Law Firm Installs Concept Search Engine
In the legal community, search technology has become as critical to the preparation of major lawsuits as securing witnesses and researching case law. The electronic file in a given case can easily encompass hundreds of thousands of pages. Using keyword filters to mine that mountain of information can not only be inefficient but also leave important evidence buried simply because it fails to precisely match the language of the query.
To solve the problem, Foley & Lardner LLP recently became the first law firm to equip attorneys and staff with in-house concept searching capabilities when reviewing electronic evidence. The concept search engine forms the cornerstone of a custom litigation-support platform that Foley built for its large national litigation department.
The system promises to save hours of work while also yielding more thorough results, including information that cannot be found through keyword searches. This stems from the system's ability to infer meaning and perform human-like associations through sophisticated mathematical algorithms modeled on human information processing.
As a result, the system can find relevant documents even if they do not share words or phrases with a query. A search on asbestos, for example, will automatically return documents concerning associated topics such as mesothelioma and Johns-Manville because the system "understands" the relationships among them.
In addition, users can search by sentence, paragraph or the entire document as well as word and phrase; perform thorough document reviews even if they have no knowledge of specific industry terminology; use natural language queries without complex syntax; and conduct conceptual, fielded, Boolean and metadata searches simultaneously.
Digging Deeper
Foley's commitment to concept searching reflects the ongoing explosion in electronic data associated with litigation and the need to find better ways to explore the data pool. Precision searching is imperative because any given document may contain a smoking gun or exculpatory evidence that may influence the outcome of a case.
In 2004, for example, former star investment banker Frank Quattrone was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation into stock offerings at Credit Suisse First Boston in part because of an email telling employees it was "time to clean up those files" after he learned of the investigation. Similarly, a Massachusetts wrongful death suit involving the diet drug combination Phen-Fen was quickly settled after the discovery of an email from an employee in the pharmaceutical company's accounting department who complained about "writing checks to fat people worried about a silly lung problem."
Concept searching reduces the risk that this kind of vital evidence will be overlooked. It also reduces the number of queries required to complete the electronic discovery process. This, in turn, shortens the review cycle and helps control costs to the client.
Foley expects not only to shorten and sharpen its electronic discovery efforts, but also to allocate its human resources more intelligently. This is because the firm is using the relevance rankings returned by the system to determine which issues will be handled by senior attorneys, associates and paralegals, respectively.
Significance for Enterprises
While Foley's embrace of concept-based searching is particularly significant for the legal community, the same basic benefits apply to electronic search in enterprises, government agencies and other environments. Regardless of the industry sector, the technology's intelligent information retrieval capabilities offer a quantum leap over keyword-based searches. They also have benefits unique to each kind of deployment.
In the case of enterprises, for example, one of the key advantages of concept searching involves the ability to hunt for information across disparate internal data stores. This saves time by eliminating the need for users to search each business application and database individually. It also allows results from all sources to be returned in a single results set for faster processing.
With the availability of concept search engines like Semetric that can be embedded in custom applications with virtually any combination of components, organizations today have new opportunities to harness the power of conceptual search for uses ranging from electronic data discovery to corporate knowledge management systems, intranets, customer service portals and beyond. For law firms, Foley & Lardner is leading the way.
Leveraging Semetric's Advantages
By choosing Engenium's Semetric technology as its concept search platform, Foley also gained a number of additional advantages related to Semetric's patented architecture. These include:
Complete automation—Unlike other products, Semetric does not require manual assembly, input and updating of synonym lists, lexicons or thesauri in order to build the knowledge set required for document searches. Instead, Semetric indexes and adjusts to changes in document sets and new vocabulary automatically. This dramatically reduces setup and maintenance time, lowering overall costs.
- Progressively smarter searches—Semetric's patented "portability" from one information set to another is enabling Foley to share the knowledge set built for a given case with each successive case in the same litigation category or practice area. This feature—unique in the industry—provides an incremental improvement in search results that, in turn, will give Foley's litigators a competitive advantage.
- Preliminary case overview—In addition to Engenium's Semetric search engine, Foley is using the company's Autometric clustering engine to make it possible to intelligently group documents according to theme even before users begin the search process. These thematic "clusters" provide a snapshot of key issues that can help users structure and prioritize their research. Any document in any "cluster" can then be searched through Semetric, yielding maximum results in minimum time.
Engenium is a leading provider of intelligent search and search-related products designed to improve information access for business users. Founded to overcome the shortcomings of existing information retrieval solutions, the company has incorporated a full range of search capabilities from keyword to conceptual in its patented and award-winning Semetric® platform in order to streamline interaction with business applications and services.