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The Iterative e-Discovery Searching Method

By Douglas Herman
June 26, 2007

Searching for potentially relevant documents in a huge mass of electronically stored information ('ESI') is a lot like panning for gold. Before you can get the nuggets you're looking for, you'll need not only the right tools, but also the right process. Your sifting pan needs to have the right-sized holes ' not too large (or gold will slip through) and not too small (or you won't be able to sift out the sand).

And the company you hire to do the searching for you has to know what to look for and how to make the tools that they are given work ' so that the smaller, less obvious, pieces are not missed. Most important, you must know where to look for the gold in the first place.

Legal teams face similar concerns at the beginning of each litigation. From a veritable river of digital information ' including e-mails, documents, voice mails, video files, databases and other more obscure data sources ' lawyers need to extract only those specific pieces of data that will be relevant to their case. Litigators seek the e-mails, documents or other digital objects that will help exonerate their client. Knowledge of the data that a client has, good or bad, helps counsel properly build a case.

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