Software ensures defensible search for eDiscovery.
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Press Release Summary:
Powered by Meaning-Based technology, Search Process Validation offers conceptual search and all other legacy search methods, including keyword search, to add flexibility and defensibility to every legal discovery phase. It helps determine most suitable search methodology to employ at each stage and guides users through process by providing transparent logic and auditable results. Additional functionality covers real-time validation sampling and dynamic search tracing.
Original Press Release:
Autonomy Introduces Industry First Search Process Validation Module to Ensure Defensible Search
Flexible Search Options and Visibility of Search Logic Ensure Auditable FRCP Compliance and Defensible Search Strategy
CAMBRIDGE, England and SAN FRANCISCO, California, February 3 -- Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, today unveiled the industry's most advanced, forensically sound search module, Search Process Validation (SPV). Powered by Autonomy's Meaning-Based technology, SPV uniquely offers conceptual search as well as all other legacy search methods, including keyword search; adding flexibility and defensibility to every phase of the legal discovery lifecycle. SPV helps users determine the most suitable search methodology to employ at each stage, and guides them through the process by providing transparent logic and auditable results for any of the search methodologies used. SPV mitigates risk and brings added defensibility to the search process throughout the entire discovery lifecycle, enabling legal experts to benefit from advanced conceptual analytics, defensibility reporting, real-time validation sampling, and dynamic search tracing.
"Organizations are under increased pressure to adopt a forensically sound search strategy," commented Brian Weiss, VP Information Governance, Autonomy. "In Victor Stanley, Inc. vs. Creative Pipe, for example, the judge ruled against the defendants on the grounds that they had failed to provide the court with rationale for the selection of keywords and with the qualifications of the defendant and his lawyers to design an effective and reliable search method," elaborated Weiss. "Autonomy's solution mitigates this risk by offering different search methods and guiding the user to choose the most suitable one, or a combination thereof, in a fully audited manner."
Autonomy's core infrastructure software product, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), powers the SPV module in all Autonomy eDiscovery solutions. IDOL embraces all legacy search methods such as keyword, Boolean, metadata, and parametric and others, but is perhaps best known for its pioneering conceptual search. In helping users select the best search method for their needs, SPV clearly delineates the query pipeline, including concepts found, term frequencies, and repositories searched for each search method used. SPV provides a detailed audit trail, highlighting both conceptual clusters and keywords in the result set as well as any user profiling, entity extraction or metadata elements. In addition, the business logic and parameters used in the relevancy calculation are transparent and audited to ensure a defensible search process.
During early case assessment, for instance, Autonomy's unique conceptual analytics can expedite the search refinement process and the negotiation of keyword lists by suggesting "ideas," phrases, or conceptual terms, that are common to the returned files. By understanding the concepts that exist in the data, Autonomy automatically offers a list of ideas and terms that the legal team can use to refine their searches. For instance, in a keyword search for "fraud," the engine may also reveal that terms such as "cheat," "scam," or "stock option backdating" exist in the data as conceptually relevant terms.
Autonomy also automatically clusters results into thematically similar groups, virtually eliminating the time-consuming process of manual sampling and enabling full visibility into the results set. At later stages of litigation, SPV uses advanced conceptual analytics to help ensure auditable compliance with the Federal Rules and case law while also dramatically reducing the costs of downstream production.
Autonomy's Search Process Validation module offers numerous unique features, including:
- Dynamic Search Tracer - SPV keeps a running, audit trail of the user's search history, with the ability to create snapshots of any (or all) of the relevant steps and results for future re-use and collaboration with colleagues. This empowers users to refine an investigation methodology by saving and re-using search queries, sampling delta sets and drop outs, or by building and saving search profiles from relevant documents.
- Advanced Term List Analytics - SPV provides researchers with intuitive statistical and visual tools for determining the impact of search modifications. Configurable views provide dynamic representations of term frequencies, stem variants and wildcard expansions. Researchers can view granular analytics that include term hit counts, family, data types, languages, custodians, and other document metadata. From these views, users can investigate the impact of proposed term list changes, drill into sub-queries, and capture delta sets or validation samples.
- Search Audit - The audit provides such details as repositories searched, search terms used and omitted, query expansions, concepts involved, and the analytics used to arrive at the final result set. The audit form is customizable to suit the unique needs of each case or phase of discovery.
- Search Journey - SPV clearly delineates the logical path that the search engine took to arrive at a given set of results. It reveals the key concept terms that were found, along with pertinent metadata, repositories searched and the relevancy threshold reached.
- Real-time Validation Sampling - SPV's real-time, audited validation sampling can be launched at any stage in the search process. The search terms used, the percentage of files selected for sampling, methodology used in sampling, and other relevant factors are captured and tracked for validation reporting. This process allows researchers to build and maintain classical validation sampling and QA reports to justify the search strategy and prove a defensible process.
- Defensibility Reporting - Data statistics, validation, and term list refinement reports can be output for the Meet and Confer, tracked over time, or packaged for final results production, with the ability to include concept and custodian mapping features as required.
With access to over 400 repositories and over 1000 file formats, including audio and video files, Autonomy provides a fully FRCP-compliant search for a complete inventory of the required enterprise corpus with no "jump-outs" or partial indexing. In use by all top 10 law firms and by over half of the Fortune 25, Autonomy's eDiscovery solutions provide true assurance of a superior and defensible search strategy.
For more information on Autonomy's Search Lifecycle and Validation solution, please visit www.autonomy.com.
About Autonomy
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement and was recently ranked by IDC as the clear market share leader in enterprise search with market share nearly double that of its nearest competitor. Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, email, voice or video. Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including information access technology, pan-enterprise search, information governance, end-to-end eDiscovery and archiving, records management, business process management, customer interaction solutions, and video and audio analysis, and is recognized by industry analysts as the clear leader in enterprise search.
Autonomy's customer base is comprised of more than 17,000 global companies and organizations including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler AG, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. More than 350 companies OEM Autonomy technology, including BEA, Citrix, EDS, H-P, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and TIBCO, and the company has over 400 VARs and Systems Integrators. The company has offices worldwide. Please visit www.autonomy.com for more information on Autonomy.
Autonomy and the Autonomy logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autonomy Corporation plc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
