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Litigation Update: Supercharging Legacy Databases

By Joseph Howie
February 24, 2005

Corporations and law firms who manage large ongoing and mission-critical litigation, such as toxic tort or products liability cases, are supercharging the databases they rely on to track and manage the facts and documents in those cases. They are adding full text and linguistic pattern searching capabilities to enable them to gain better command and mastery of the facts and the documents in the case. It is, after all, difficult to have command and mastery of facts or documents you can't find, or to see relationships or patterns in documents you've never before reviewed as a group. Not only are the new databases more effective, but the costs of supercharging them are often offset by savings from avoiding the ongoing costs of the legacy databases.

Many legacy databases are kept active because they contain documents that are still being used in ongoing litigation. However, those databases may not contain the level of data representation or provide the search capabilities that would even be considered entry level today. For example, many of them may do not provide full text searching because at the time they were built, optical character recognition (OCR) was considered unproven or prohibitively expensive. Almost none of them will have powerful new search capabilities inherent in linguistic pattern searching.

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