The evidence is clear

Cataphora, which offers evidence analytics and review software for the legal industry, has introduced Best Match First, a new offering designed to significantly accelerate the processing of massive quantities of evidentiary data for legal matters, especially those involving more than 10 terabytes of data.

The company reports that in the case of such very large collections of data, the order in which the data is processed is much more important than it is with smaller scale collections. Depending on available processing hardware, Cataphora says, potentially critical data could wait for weeks to be processed, resulting in similar delays before it can be reviewed. Increasing this risk is the fact that it is often very difficult to initially know where all of the really important data is. Best Match First is said to process the most relevant data first by using an iterative process that is based on both a set of initial parameters and on feedback provided by legal team reviewers or investigators.

Best Match First performs a very rapid initial scan of the data prior to indexing it in order to determine how rich in relevant data is a particular hard drive, server, set of custodial data or any other subset of data. On this basis, an initial prioritization is made for the full processing of the data, guaranteeing that the most important data is both processed first and reviewed first, Cataphora explains. As reviewers or investigators work through the initial documents, their decisions about relevance are automatically passed back to the processing engine in order to further refine the processing prioritization decisions.