Shooting in the Dark...The Digital Group Helps You Find Your Target

by JulieLaboe

The Digital Group (T/DG) plays a very critical role in the successful development of many industry leading products. Specializing in “Enterprise Search Strategy”, T/DG has developed present and future technology approaches that provide a well rounded approach to information retrieval in eDiscovery.  One example of industry leading software in which T/DG is a central contributor is CT® Summation’s CaseVault®.

So how does T/DG’s technology expertise help you?  Let me start with a story.  Recently, my poor husband who happens to be a litigator had to endure my preaching about “Enterprise Searching” and its benefits.  He responded that he “could definitely see how important it is for cases with a large volume of documents.”  So then it dawned on me, even the intelligent, 40ish lawyers who are computer savvy don’t completely understand what’s happened with the volume of documents generated in business – probably because they’re too busy practicing law.  I was then reminded of an article I recently read by Ralph Losey in SUE magazine titled “E-Discovery and the ‘Protodigital’ Emperor’s New Clothes”.  He wrote about a keynote speech given by Ken Withers in which Ken introduces the term Protodigital.  In his speech Ken stated, “What do we mean by that? ‘Protodigital?’ This senior generation of litigators (and I’m at the tail end of it myself) is fully cognizant that we live in a digital world and are themselves likely to use computers to some extent – for word processing, for email, to read a court decision online, perhaps even to generate a spreadsheet.”  He continued, “but they are still thinking of the digital information system as a set of tools for producing information (the document, the email communication, the legal opinion or spreadsheet) that they will manage as though that information were paper-based. They think that it is somehow appropriate to manage digital information, and discovery, by analogy to the paper world.”  In Mr. Losey’s opinion, “trial lawyers, and some in-house counsel too, blame the new rules and our judges. They see the problem but misdiagnose the cause. They are hoodwinking themselves just like the emperor with his phony new clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale.”  And I agree with Mr. Losey that there is already a solution to this problem in the professionals who dedicate themselves full-time to eDiscovery practices and I think just as importantly are the tools available to those professionals.

One of the issues that I don’t think lawyers fully appreciate is the vast amount of data created because of the use of technology.  For example, consider that approximately 80% of all information in business is living electronically in emails, text, voice and video, and that several years ago the United States Postal Service (“USPS”) released a study that stated that there was more email sent in one day than the USPS handled in an entire year.  It’s safe to say that most cases will have a large volume of documents and unless your client is a large sophisticated company,  odds are that you will have the added headache of data not being stored in a structured manner.  For example, one of my law firm clients became involved in a breach of contract case.  Their client had a total of three employees including himself.  After obtaining the data from their client, my client ended up with a terabyte of data.  A terabyte of data is roughly 438,000,000 documents or 146,000 boxes of paper.  We had two weeks to review the documents for privilege and produce them.  This is where Enterprise Searching proved invaluable.

You’ve heard of keyword searching and conceptual searching – these are just two components of what makes up an Enterprise Search.  In relation to eDiscovery, Enterprise Searching allows the winnowing down of document populations through de-duplication or near de-duplication, by clustering same type documents, and similar meaning searches just to name a few.  As Jeff Schott, Business Development Manager for The Digital Group stated, “as part of an overall information retrieval strategy.  It contains subset techniques such as concept search – which is one method of enabling users to search for the concept or meaning of what they are interested in and extends their reach into information that would otherwise be inaccessible with traditional keyword searches. There are other components which can be used to comprise an Enterprise Search Strategy including parametric and scoped searches, as well as techniques such as clustering.”  Using only a couple of the components of this technology made it possible for my client to reduce their terabyte of data (438 million documents) to 71,000 documents which they then reviewed for privilege.  It is almost impossible to determine the incredible amount of time this technology saves.

About The Digital Group

The Digital Group is a premier provider of information technology services with extensive expertise in all facets of software development. With capabilities at all points of the software life-cycle, The Digital Group can provide support from concept to development to operations. For the last decade their teams have been delivering industry leading solutions for their customers.

Many of their projects involve the development of customer facing applications where the software is either the product itself or is fundamental in the delivery of their services. It has been through this type of project where Digital Group engineers have been able to deliver real value to their customers as the result of high quality and innovation in these situations is increased revenue.  Whether you need a single resource to complement your team or a fully integrated on-site/offshore project team to execute your vision, The Digital Group can meet your needs. Contact Jeff Schott, Business Development Manager, by email at jeff.schott@thedigitalgroup.com or by phone at (609) 524 2453.

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