Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

EDD ANALYTICS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

April 9, 2009

As we saw yesterday, Jeffrey the lawyer was having a tough time with the technical description of EDD analytics. So Rob Robinson of Orange Legal Technologies graciously went back and tried out a new non-technical version of his earlier note, which he sent to directly to Jeffrey, who was most happy to receive it – and says he now understands.

So, for the benefit of those readers who were equally confused, here is Rob's non-technical version:

Analytics is taking the ESI available after collection and acting on it with available tools to reduce the data set as much as possible before entering into the typically more costly and time consuming phase of electronic discovery processing. Analytics should allow for the development of an understanding of the ESI prior to Meet and Confer conferences (as required) and prior to detailed planning for processing costs and review resource costs.

  • Indexing is making a list of all the ESI available in the data set. 
  • Filtering is getting rid of data that appears to be irrelevant to the case.
  • Near Deduplication is getting rid of “like” data that appears to be available more than once in the data set.
  • Sampling is looking at the ESI on a small scale to determine results that should be indicative of the entire data set.
  • Search Term Scoping is seeing what search term keywords might best be recommended and used for the purpose of searching the data set for responsive files.

I am sure many other can provide even more complete and succinct definitions. Also, many people seem to use the term “Analytics” and “Early Case Assessment” interchangeably.

Additionally, while one may argue about the applicability of the term “analytics” – that is a discussion for someone else – as the term is certainly used in much of the eDiscovery literature today – hence my using the term here.

The underlying focus is that of preparing for efficient processing and review. The smaller the data set the earlier in the overall process the increasing economic (time and money) benefit “down stream”

I hope this very “informal, as we talk” explanation helps – it is an interesting discussion – and I – like many others – welcome more detailed writings on the subject – and I do not in any way shape of form pretend to be the expert – just one who is interested in doing things more efficiently in the area of eDiscovery.

Thanks Rob for investing additional time on this. Jeffrey's point, that we need to be able to make lawyers understand by simplifying our language, was well taken.

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