TREC Legal Track Making Progress on E-Discovery Searching
The work of the Legal Track of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC Legal Track) is improving search techniques for electronic discovery, according to Jason Krause’s article, “In Search of the Perfect Search,” ABA Journal, April 2009. Krause reports that researchers in TREC Legal Track have identified the following techniques that appear to yield search results better than those realized by litigators working independently and using traditional Boolean techniques:
• “[L]awyers need to work with opposing counsel to identify good search terms and to negotiate proposed Boolean search strings.” A hypothetical example of such a negotiation is available at http://abajournal.com/files/booleanexample-1.pdf ;
• Lawyers should “use sampling—testing to see whether the search engines are finding documents known to be relevant. That means deploying what e-discovery experts call iterative feedback loops. These involve a team of lawyers and other in-house experts conducting searches in stages, and conferring with counsel and experts from the opposing party to determine whether the process is working”; and
• Lawyers, when designing “a search, [] should identify the data types and then prove that the search tool they’re using works with those data types.”
[Robert Richards via Law Librarian Blog]
