Often staff or contract attorneys are paid little for the tedious and thankless task while their work is billed to clients with a significant mark up.

1. Legal Daily News Feature
The Power of the Pentium (Concept Searching)
By Eric Rondeau
One of the necessary evils in litigation is document review. Nowadays, the traditional definition of document has come to encompass
a broad spectrum of data, from e-mails to Word documents, from text messages to voice mail as well as the flotsam contained on a
hard drive. Whether you’re litigating in state or federal court, collection, management and subsequent review of data is getting more
complicated. It is also getting more expensive. Not only is there the expense of getting and housing the data/documents, but there is
the costly component of review, which in many large defense firms is often their bread and butter when it comes to racking up litigation
fees. Often staff or contract attorneys are paid little for the tedious and thankless task while their work is billed to clients with a
significant mark up.
07/24/10 It figures out what you are trying to ask or, even better, what
the documents say in relationship to one another. No longer
However, with the changing are clumsy Boolean type searches necessary. In a Boolean
economy and clients’ ever growing search, you need to anticipate what information is buried in
savviness about attorney billing the data. It becomes a game of shooting targets in the dark.
practices, firms need to confront head on the need for more Conceptual search tools cluster information that is relative
efficient discovery practices. Data analytics tools have improved and related to your search parameters and delimiters. Search
by leaps and bounds in the last several years and are often for ‘’war’’ and you get data conceptually related to ‘’conflict’’,
undervalued and underused. They can be, when applied ‘’tank’’, ‘’offensive’’, and ‘’attack’’. The tool can also point out
intelligently, an indispensible and very powerful tool. relationships between data that you hadn’t conceived. It makes
finding that smoking gun all the more easier. It also catches
One particular analytical tool, which I’ve used successfully and things a human being wouldn’t necessarily find. On top of
is offered by a number of legal software developers, is based on that, it can group pools of data into categories to make actual
conceptual analysis of data. To get into how it works here would manual reviewing of documents faster and easier.
not only make your head and my head spin, but would also
take up more space than I am allotted for this column. In brief, This brings me to my final point. This is not an argument for
on the theoretical level, the process of conceptual searching eliminating the human element. People always have sparks of
works a lot like T9 or similar programs based on linguistical genius or moments of epiphany where ideas coalesce that lead
modeling. It is, as Wikipedia so eloquently puts it: to the discovery of a new defense or resolution of a particular
legal conundrum. These tools are meant to be used in tandem
an automated information retrieval method that is used to with human brain power. Time saved on the drudgery usually
search electronically stored unstructured text (for example, associated with data processing and document review allows for
digital archives, email, scientific literature, etc.) for more time spent on formulating arguments and theories related
information that is conceptually similar to the information to your data analysis and also save your client money.
provided in a search query. In other words, the ideas
expressed in the information retrieved in response to a
concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in
the text of the query.
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