OntoSearch

Peter Drucker once said, “…The most important contribution…in the 21st century is…[the] increase productivity of Understanding Work and the Knowledge Worker.”

 

Drucker recognized in the early 60s what has already proven to be true in the present age: US companies would soon undermine themselves with data gluttony. According to the most recent reports coming out of Berkeley, about 400,000 TERAbytes of new details is generated each year by e-mail alone. And yet, 59% of US businesses did not have any e-mail retention policies. US Corporations spent .6 billion in 2005 to analyze their internal e-mails, but still 62% of these same corporations doubt they would be able to show that their e-mail records are accurate and dependable.

 

In this present age of the “Details Superhighway,” organizations literally “do not know what they know.” And for attorneys who must review this avalanche of info (usually from multiple sources) to ferret out “smoking guns” for a trial, this difficulty of details overload is a lot far more compounded.

 

Our current methods of electronic discovery (the method of collecting and reviewing electronic evidence generated by both sides of a lawsuit) is limited by our present day storage and filing systems. Like the a lot revered Dewey decimal system, significantly of the data generated right now is still classified using taxonomies, foldering systems based on categorizations and their relationships. One of the more visible limitation of this sort of filing is that seldom would two people classify information in the exact same way. After all, what would be considered essential by an engineer would probably not hold the same weight for an accountant. Would a letter concerning the purchase of a Microsoft license be filed under “Software”, “Budget”, “License”, or “Correspondence”? The answer will generally depend on the content of the letter and also the interpretation of the content by the reader.

 

And there lies the key word: content. In the present landscape of Legal Technologies, content and interpretation have grow to be nearly holistic. With data being piled and buried on top of each other, the capacity to wade via and retrieve data based on content has grow to be the latest weapon for an attorney or litigator. Electronic Discovery vendors, like Cataphora and Syngence, are now beginning to push the capacity to perform content searching using linguistic pattern matching or profiling. Instead of folders or categories, documents will now be grouped and linked via the actual content contained within them. This offers not only a significantly far more accurate retrieval system, but also takes away the limits of key word searching. A search for the term “Santa Claus” will now reveal documents discussing “Saint Nicholas” or “the Jolly Red-Suited gift-giver”. The technology that is now beginning to penetrate the legal market will allow computers the ability to relate information to every other with practically the exact same prudence as you or I. This allows searches to be performed not based on keywords, but based on an entire document or concept. A search for the word diamond, depending on the case or conversations involved, would yield either info on jewelry or possibly the game of baseball.

 

The impact of this new kind of system is still being gauged. It stands to not only change the world of litigation, but possibly the way we conduct any sort of searching, be it on the internet or within our own hard drives. The underlying technology contains the possible to break down language barriers by decreasing actual words to patterns or semantics. With such technology, even a photo can be used as a search base, pulling up comparable pictures. It is the core item with which Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide-Web, hopes to push forth the “Semantic Web”, or as some have come to call it, “Net 2.0″. And it is a technology that we will no doubt see far more of within law firms in the coming years.