Six Articles on Electronic - Craig Ball

Craig Ball © 2007
Unlocking Keywords
By Craig Ball
[Originally published in Law Technology News, January 2007]
The notion that words hold mythic power has been with us as long as language.
We know we don't need to ward off evil spirits, but we still say, "Gesundheit!" when someone
sneezes. Can't hurt.
But misplaced confidence in the power of word searches can seriously hamper electronic data
discovery. Perhaps because keyword searching works so well in the regimented realm of
automated legal research, lawyers and judges embrace it in EDD with little thought given to its
effectiveness as a tool for exploring less structured information. Too bad, because the difference
between keyword searches that get the goods and those that fail hinges on thoughtful
preparation and precaution.
Text Translation
Framing effective searches starts with understanding that most of what we think of as textual
information isn't stored as text. Brilliant keywords won't turn up anything if the data searched
isn't properly processed.
Take Microsoft Outlook e-mail. The message we see isn't a discrete document so much as a
report assembled on-the- fly from a database. As with any database, the way information is
stored little resembles the way we see it onscreen after our e-mail program works its magic by
decompressing, decoding, and decrypting messages.
Lots of evidence we think of as textual isn't stored as text, including fax transmissions, .tiff or
PDF documents, PowerPoint word art, CAD/CAM blueprints, and zip archives. For each, the
search software must process the data to insure content is accessible as searchable text.
Be certain the search tool you or your vendor employ can access and interpret all of the data
that should be seen as text.
Recursion
Reviewing a box of documents that contains envelopes within folders, you'd open everything to
ensure you saw everything.
Computers store data within data such that an Outlook file can hold an e-mail transmitting a zip
archive containing a PowerPoint with an embedded .tiff image.
It's the electronic equivalent of Russian nesting dolls. If the text you seek is inside that .tiff, the
search tool must drill down through each nested item, opening each with appropriate software to
ensure all content is searched. This is called recursion, and it's an essential feature of
competent search. Be sure your search tool can dig down as deep as the evidence.
Exceptions
Even when search software opens wide and digs deep, it will encounter items it can't read:
password protected files, proprietary formats, and poor optical character recognition. When that
115