LEGAL

The largest single cost in litigation is discovery – as much as 43% according to industry analysts. Compounding discovery is its electronic equivalent – eDiscovery, or EDD (electronically discoverable documents).

As the world moves rapidly to electronic information, legal discovery takes on new and complex meanings:
What is the value of Metadata?
What are the format incompatibility issues for EDD?
What tools are available to “discover” information within EDD?
How do companies cope with terabytes and even petabytes of EDD?

Industry buzzwords like defensibility of eDiscovery take a backseat when companies need to cope with vast amounts of information in a defined timeframe. There are simply not enough paralegals in the world to “mine” a 2 petabyte database in the time normally allotted.

Content Analyst’s unique capabilities address the growing need for “more than keyword search,” and our ability to understand what is being fed to Content Analyst makes new, powerful features possible and cost-effective.

Key features our clients find useful for EDD are:

Automatic Categorization
Conceptual Search (Search on Steroids)
Cross-Lingual Search
Automatic Summarization
Instant Context

Automatic Categorization - How it Works

Content Analyst was designed from the ground up as a learning system. Much like a paralegal needs to learn about a case or in some instances an industry, when performing discovery. Content Analyst can be similarly trained about the key facts and factors.

“Training” Content Analyst is as simple as providing a sample set of documents – exemplars – that contain concepts or phrases relevant to the case. The only other information it needs to perform are categories in which the information should be sorted.

Armed with this basic information, Content Analyst is ready to receive documents. It will read each one, comparing concepts and word contexts against the exemplar set, and assign a categorization. Our categorization on average achieves 90% accuracy versus controlled human categorization. The legal market talks in terms of precision (% of relative vs. identified documents) and recall (actual % of all relative documents that were found) – our results in controlled testing were 89% and 88.3% respectively.

Automatic Categorization - How it delivers Value

Automatic categorization cuts the time to sort through an initial collection of potentially responsive documents by 70%. It quickly identifies patterns, which are by far the single most important evidential element in a case. On television, the lawyer (the hero) always finds the proverbial “smoking gun,” but in the real world most successful litigation comes down to showing patterns of abuse. In the past, the volume of information to be searched combined with the constraints on time meant useful evidence often remained buried. Today, we help our customers find everything there is to find, with time to spare for evaluation and strategy. Content Analyst enables its customers to retrieve all the relevant documents needed to prove or challenge abuse and win cases.

“Search On Steroids” - How it Works

Content Analyst’s powerful search software goes beyond the simple keyword and Boolean logic searches that power most legal solutions. Our software is trained to search out and identify concepts and relationships as it performs its indexing function. The more documents that Content Analyst reads, the more it actually learns. Obscure relationships and concepts become “fleshed out” as the software reads more and more relevant documents.

Content Analyst turns these concepts and relationships into mathematical expressions – after all, language is mathematic in nature. By using the power of mathematics, Content Analyst can quickly search for related concepts, ideas, and context based on a sentence, a phrase, or even a whole paragraph.

“Search On Steroids” – How it delivers Value

Obfuscation is a common problem in the legal world, especially for documents like patents, where obscuring terminology can actually be a good thing. Other common search problems – that can’t be easily addressed with traditional techniques – are synonomy and polysemy. Everyone is familiar with synonyms – and some systems rely on large word lists for cross-references; often, a word is missed.

Polysemy is never solved out of context – these are words like “bank” that may mean the side of a river, a financial institution, or a particular pool shot.
Finally, there are unintentional errors: spelling mistakes and more often, scanning errors.

With Content Analyst, your initial search addresses all these problems. Content Analyst can reduce search times by 65+%, and find relevant documents that all other solutions would miss. It’s rare to find a “smoking gun” in any litigation matter, but when building patterns of abuse or wrongful behavior, every additional relevant document you find makes your case that much stronger.

Cross-Lingual Search - How it Works

Thanks in part to its roots in the Intelligence community, the Content Analyst engine has already been trained in most major world languages (including Middle East and Asian languages). The way this works has no parallel in the search world: Content Analyst actually knows how the same concept would be expressed in different languages. Again, this is because it reads and understands context, relationships, and similar context, allowing Content Analyst to easily determine whether a foreign language document is worth translating or not.

Content Analyst’s basic cross-lingual skills are easily enhanced to address specific markets or professions by simply “training” the engine with duplicate sets of documents in various languages. Content Analyst will correlate the relationships and context both within the language sets and across the language sets, allowing Content Analyst to think multi-lingually.

The legal world is now a global one: few companies deal only within the US and only then with US-based concerns. When foreign parties are involved, finding a pertinent document (regardless of language of origin) could be the difference in settling an issue quickly and favorably.

Cross-Lingual Search – How it delivers Value

The value of cross-lingual search is obvious: it will cut translation costs immensely as only relevant documents will need to be translated. Also valuable is the time that cross-lingual search saves our customers. Even with on-site translators and machine-assisted translation, it is difficult to translate more than 3-4 pages per person per hour. Therefore, a large translation effort, prior to any real relevant searching, can add weeks or more to the discovery period. With Content Analyst, that challenge is eliminated – only the relevant documents need be translated, and those can occur after initial discovery, while the case summaries are being built.

Automatic Summarization - How it Works

Another powerful feature built into Content Analyst is its ability to extract the most relevant subject matter or topics from a document and present only those paragraphs or sentences that most closely match the subject matter in the document. Through easily-tuned settings, multiple-section documents can be summarized by section, and summaries can be made briefer or more detailed with a few mouse-clicks.

Summarization is very different than an abstract. With an abstract, the author is telling you what he or she wants you to believe they are discussing. With intelligent, contextual-based summarization, however, the result is truly reflective of the information.

Automatic Summarization – How it delivers Value

By being able to create summaries of relevant documents automatically, the arduous task of manually reading through the documents and writing out a human-generated abstract is eliminated. Accurate summaries of relevant documents speed the building of a case, since attorneys can easily select documents based on what topics they are discussing.

“Instant Context” - How it Works

Content Analyst creates an extensive, cross-referenced index that is based on subject matter, context, and concepts. When it prepares documents for searching, a byproduct of that index is the ability to instantly have Content Analyst correlate a word or phrase to the words or phrases that most closely match it in meaning. It displays a pop-up window, and the corresponding terms are arranged in order of relevance.

“Instant Context” – How it delivers Value

With Instant Context, it’s as if you’re having Content Analyst determine the meaning of a word, phrase, or term by seeing it used in context as well as seeing any words that are even slightly synonymous.

For the legal researcher, this virtually eliminates the time-consuming effort of having to look up unfamiliar words or phrases – and this can take days off of a typical research effort.

In addition, Instant Context completely eliminates the frustrating task of trying to determine the intended word when there is a typographical, spelling, or scanning error – again, Content Analyst already knows that the misrepresented word is actually a term with which you’re already familiar.