ZyLAB Releases Educational Whitepaper to Provide Understanding Between Legal Searches and Web Searches in Support of e-Discovery

MCLEAN, Va.-(Business Wire)-February 17, 2009 - ZyLAB, an innovative developer of Information Access Solutions, today announced the immediate availability of a free e-discovery whitepaper that outlines the fundamental differences between the capabilities of Web search engines and the real search functionality and approaches needed to support the strategic requirements of legal, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

One of the most compelling differences is that typical Web search engines are optimized to find only the most relevant documents; they are not optimized to find all relevant documents. As a result, those searching in legal or law enforcement environments need to find all potentially relevant documents. Moreover, these investigators require different tool functionalities to quickly and efficiently navigate and review relevant document sets. The combination of these two requirements encompasses the practical difference between common Web search tools and legal search tools tailored for discovery-type activities.

This whitepaper was featured in the February 2009 issue of KMWorld in a special supplement on e-discovery. To download this whitepaper visit: http://www.zylab.com/downloads/whitepapers/WP72%20Legal%20Search%20vs%20Web%20Search.pdf

Whitepaper Synopsis:

Experienced users have become quite savvy in utilizing search engine optimization techniques to enhance high rankings. This level of sophistication works in both directions. People involved in criminal activities (such as fraud) don’t want to be in the top 10 of a search engine result list, so they use advanced techniques to hide their documented activities and avoid appearing in any search list.
Many cases exist in which, rather than using an e-discovery-appropriate search tool, organizations implement Web search technology or Web search appliances to perform full-text searches on large e-mail or electronic file collections throughout corporate networks. These organizations soon realize that the technical constraints of Web search technologies compromise the ability to meet set deadlines and address the requirements of regulators and courts, all of which can lead to higher costs and possible fines. Unfortunately, the limitations of Web search technologies are often not discovered until it’s too late.
Typical queries contain hundreds of words, and to catch spelling variations (e.g from typos or optical character recognition errors), a good search tool must be able to utilize wildcards (placeholders for beginning, middle and end of words) and fuzzy search (including support for first character changes). Web search technologies are either unable to execute such queries or are too slow when attempting them.
Search engine needs to produce exactly the same results anytime it is used on the same data collection. Web search engines or engines based on certain high-dimensional statistical relevance ranking technology tend to produce different results over time. Cases relying on these kinds of searches are compromised in court.
In some cases, a Web search appliance only keeps the 20,000 most relevant files in its index for a particular occurrence. This search engine is completely useless in a legal context. Furthermore, many Web search technologies cannot index documents that consist of compound documents (e.g. ZIP and PST), bitmap data, multimedia documents, older electronic file formats, and encrypted files.
Regulators, courts and opposing counsel often have very specific document format requirements for disclosed data. Users should be able to support common legal file formats such as DII, EDRM XML, iPro or Concordance load files. Also, users must have the ability to redact documents, in which case users need to TIFF-print native electronic files to verify that all non-relevant information is no longer in the disclosed document. In addition, retrieved data needs to be collected and copied to a legal hold server, which is nearly impossible with Web search engines.

Quote for Attribution:

“Failing to address the points outlined in this whitepaper will lead to a lot of expensive and inefficient discovery work. Every irregularity, missed deadline or missing piece of data means a potential fine and more reliance on expensive outside vendors. Risk is diminished by understanding the required processes, matching procedures to those processes, using the right tools, and working with the right partners to lessen your exposure and costs.”

- Dr. Johannes Scholtes, President, ZyLAB North America LLC

Additional Resources:

About ZyLAB:

For over 20 years, ZyLAB has provided commercial and government organizations around the world with award-winning information access solutions. The ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform is a complete XML-based system that provides a secure foundation for the long-term archiving, management and retrieval of information, from digitized paper documents, to electronic files, to e-mail and attachments, to multimedia.

With over 7,500 installations and 350,000 users worldwide, ZyLAB has a wealth of experience and knowledge across a variety of industries and business applications. Federal clients include the Executive Office of the President and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, as well as all branches of the US Armed Forces and investigative teams at the FBI, SEC, and Amtrak’s OIG. Hundreds of state and local governments also rely on ZyLAB, such as The State of California, Montgomery County, Maryland, and The Town of Jackson, Wyoming. ZyLAB’s numerous commercial clients include leading companies like American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Dominion Virginia Power, Lockheed Martin, Pacific Life, and Shell Oil. For more information visit: www.zylab.com.

Send this news item to a friend.

Print This Page