Advanced Text Searching of Electronic Information Related to Forensic Discovery

Abstract

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure regarding production of electronic evidence, together with court rulings and penalties, have highlighted the need for timely and accurate production of electronically stored responsive evidence. Key criteria to the legal requirements include costs to produce, identification of responsive information and identification of privileged information within the responsive information. Currently the primary two methods of compliance are manual review of the documents and electronic Boolean text searches. Text searching technology has been studied for over fifty years generating literally thousands of documents and books for a literature review. The focus of the literature includes accuracy of searching, optimization of searching, and completeness of searching. Some of the literature is based on a specific field of interest such as library cards or patent filings, but most is either generic or relates to either peer-to-peer searching or Internet searching. The documents related to the field of electronic evidence are very limited in number and presented no new search techniques directly. We identified and classified the search techniques from the literature study after consideration of the applicability to electronic evidence. Using electronic evidence from actual litigation cases, the techniques were implemented to identify the thoroughness of the documents identified in the population and the related costs (time) required to identify such documents. The results from the various techniques were compared along with the costs to identify the "best" text searching method. Based on the results, we recommend implementation of a combination of the techniques to allow responsiveness to different requirements based on the legal circumstances.