Six Articles on Electronic - Craig Ball

Craig Ball © 2007
happens, it's important the search software generates an exceptions log flagging failures for
follow up.
Know how the search tool tracks and reports items not searched or incompletely searched.
Search Term Tips
So far, I've talked only about search tools; but search terms matter, too.
You'll get better results when you frame searches to account for computer rigidity and human
frailty. Some tips:
Stemming: Computers are exasperatingly literal when searching. Though mechanized
searches usually overlook differences in capitalization, they're easily confounded by variances
in prefixes or suffixes of the sort that human reviewers easily assimilate (e.g., flammable and
inflammable or exploded and exploding).
You'll miss fewer variations using stemmed searches targeting common roots of keywords; e.g.,
using "explod" to catch both exploded and exploding.
But use stemming judiciously as the more inclusive your search, the more challenging and
costly the review. Be sure to include the correct stemming operator for the search tool.
Boolean Search: Just as with legal research, pinpoint responsive items and prioritize review
using Boolean operators to find items containing both of two keywords, or keywords within a
specified proximity.
Misspelling: It's scary how many people can't spell. Even the rare good speller may hit the
wrong key or resort to the peculiar shorthand of instant messaging.
Sometimes you can be confident a particular term appears just one way in the target documents
—e-mail addresses are prime examples—but a thorough search factors in common
misspellings, acronyms, abbreviations and IM-speak.
Synonyms: Your search for "plane" won't get off the ground if you don't also look for "jet,"
"bird," "aircraft, "airliner" and "crate."
A comprehensive search incorporates synonyms as well as lingo peculiar to those whose data
is searched.
Noise words: Some words occur with such regularity it's pointless to look for them. They're
"noise words," the static on your ESI radio dial.
I recently encountered a situation where counsel chose terms like "law" and "legal" to cull data
deemed privileged. Predictably, the results were disastrously overinclusive.
I recommend testing keywords to flush out noise words. There's irrelevant text all over a
computer — in spelling dictionaries, web cache, help pages, and user license agreements.
Moreover, industries have their own parlance and noise words, so it's important to assess
noisiness against a representative sample of the environment you're searching.
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