Search Expert, Attorney Collaboration

A blog on the H5 site describes how attorneys from Covington & Burling and search experts worked together using a tested methodology to find critical documents in three different investigations. It emphasizes that the transformation of information from documents to data has made such collaboration necessary because of the layers of people and technology that lie between information and its assessment as evidence. This adds complexity to the discovery process, but a search strategy that can be quickly executed and adapted to change has repeatedly proven to be a major advantage. An example describes how the presence of a “shrug emoji” in questionable emails from an individual prompted the search team to index that emoji as a token class, making it searchable. Locating all the emails with that emoji resulted in the identification of material that was directly relevant to the matter. It is unlikely that lawyers using their own search tools could have made, let alone been able to leverage, that observation.