The Evolution of Search Technology
The Growing Importance of Conceptual Search

Further, conceptual search provides an intelligent information access layer that sits between the data and the person conducting the search. The value of this technology is important because it provides:

• Contextual location of data: Relevant information is retrieved based on context, resulting in better and more informed decisions.
• Faster identification of data: A more advanced understanding of the information is achieved, facilitating faster location of relevant information via better, more accurate search results, which provide quicker decision-making ability.
• No other technology needed: The engine does not require a query language, providing a faster path to productivity with no training required.
• Automated application of the technology: An intelligent layer is created that understands your information and continues to learn, providing the ability to automate decisions without human intervention.
• The ability to learn more as data volumes increase: An intelligent layer that "learns" sits between the business professional and the critical business information, providing accurate and relevant search results as language and terminology change and shift.

Simply stated, conceptual search is the key technology that can facilitate better and faster business decisions in a knowledge economy. Conceptual search provides a mechanism to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

Concept search has been available for several years as a tool to help legal and business professionals review data that has already been collected. Concept search can also be used before the document review and production begins for strategic analysis, witness identification, early fact assessment and search term formulation.

Concept Search as a Strategic Litigation Tool
When a new investigation or lawsuit begins, lawyers must start the process of trying to answer the who, what, where, when, why and how questions. Sometimes lawyers have a reasonably good understanding of the people, places and things early in the case, but other times they do not. Rarely, however, will the lawyer possess that knowledge to the degree that allows full early case assessment and a full understanding of who the potential witnesses are and what happened in the case.

Concept search can dramatically improve the speed at which the lawyers develop their case theories, increase the accuracy of the analysis, and decrease the expense of the process. Concept search can help attorneys identify people involved in the dispute, sift through mountains of data and provide an objective, machine-generated group of data with similar context and improve the accuracy of the typical "search-term" approach to data analysis.

Starting with even a limited amount of information about the case, the attorney will be able to identify one or two witnesses who may have knowledge of relevant facts. Through the use of concept search technology, names of other potential witnesses may be dropped into search groupings without requiring the use of search terms, without knowing in advance the names of these individuals, without having to account for misspellings or abbreviations and without having to look at the "to" or "from" lines in email headers. Armed with this information at the beginning of a case, attorneys should more quickly focus on the most important witnesses, even those who are not part of the organization, such as customers, suppliers, competitors and potential wrongdoers.

In addition, having earlier witness identification information will help the legal team ensure that they have preserved data for the right group of custodians. Rather than having to start the data identification process by interviewing each person or by preserving "everything," early use of concept search can help the legal team hone in on who is a potentially important witness. The concept search results can then be fine-tuned with custodian interview and analysis to ensure the preservation plan is complete.

In the early investigation phase of a case, lawyers frequently know very little about the facts. The investigation may start with nothing more than an anonymous call to an ethics hotline or an allegation of potential wrongdoing by a single employee. Through the use of concept search, the legal team can analyze the data of the accused wrongdoer and quickly profile the subject matter of the data. As the legal team rapidly culls out the irrelevant information, the potential facts become clearer and other witnesses emerge as possible subjects of the investigation. In incremental steps, the legal team can then collect data of others and run concept search technology against that data for sorting and grouping. This technology will help the team get a picture of the facts more quickly and more cost-effectively than the typical method of having a team of lawyers plod through every email or try to formulate guesses at search terms to zero in on the issues.

For years, lawyers have tried to develop the perfect set of search terms, the unobtainable objective of which is to find all relevant data while excluding all irrelevant data. Taking an overly narrow approach to search terms results in the team missing relevant data, but taking an overly broad approach will leave the legal team with much more data than it needs to review.

Lawyers spend hours and hours making, refining and fighting about search term lists. Typically, lawyers for the producing party want a small, narrow list, but lawyers for the requesting party want a large, broad list. But no human being is capable of developing a search-terms list that factors into account the taxonomy and lexicon of the data, nor can any human anticipate all of the abbreviations, misspellings, or "code" language intended to deceive that are prevalent in the data. Concept search can help.

We may be years away from the time that courts and litigations use concept search in lieu of search terms to identify relevant data. But concept search can be used today to fine-tune the search term approach to data identification that litigants are comfortable using.

Concept search can be used to group the data before search terms are developed. The grouped data could be reviewed by the producing party and used to develop search terms to propose to the requesting party. The requesting party, on the other hand, could apply concept search technology to a set of production data that had been identified solely by the use of search terms. Analyzing the grouped data, the requesting party could then provide the producing party with additional search terms to apply against the main data collection. Approaching term-based data productions iteratively has always been the most accurate approach. Including concept search technology in this iterative approach makes the process even better.

The Future for Conceptual Search
Attorneys and business professionals are increasingly relying upon technology, like conceptual search, to do their jobs. As more business and legal professionals collect and exchange ESI for business, litigation, and regulatory purposes, search technology will continue to improve. The days of searching through file cabinets to locate information are gone. Instead, search technology has and will continue to become an integral part of the corporate and legal business culture in locating, preserving and exchanging electronically stored information.

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Dave Chaplin and Jeff Joyce work for Kroll Ontrack Inc. (www.krollontrack.com), a company that provides technology-driven services and software to help legal, corporate and government entities as well as consumers recover, search, analyze, produce and present data efficiently and cost-effectively. Chaplin heads the advanced search technology division, and Joyce leads the ESI Consulting division, focusing on helping law firms and corporations better prepare for, respond to and fulfill their duties to discover ESI.