E-discovery

It is common practice in the U.S. for courts to require that the parties to a legal case make available to one another all material relevant to the case, including electronically held data and documents. For large corporations, such relevant information may encompass terabytes of e-mail and other files spanning many years. The challenge of E-Discovery in response to a court order is (in a relatively short amount of time) to identify, assemble, individuate, access, categorize, and analyze an organization's electronically held material, segregate all "privileged" material (which can be legally withheld), and present to the court all (and only) the required documents. The techniques needed to accomplish such a task necessarily include search, clustering, classification, filtering, social network analysis, extraction, and more - and no one of these is sufficient. The panel will describe this problem in detail, providing additional background and context on E-Discovery generally, and will explore specific techniques and cases that amply demonstrate why E-Discovery is quintessentially a "CIKM" problem -- multi-disciplinary, multi-technology, and "multi-difficult".