Email Search
Email is perhaps the most common document type to be involved in a large-scale disclosure exercise.
A single Microsoft Exchange™ server, or backup tape, may contain millions of separate emails. If the data has been collected correctly, and the metadata has been unchanged then this can be used to sort the emails for potential relevancy. A relevancy search may be conducted using a list similar to:
- Named Individuals that had access to emails (sent, received, or copied)
- Time parameter (e.g. between 1st July 2003 and 31st December 2003)
- Key words or phrases in the subject line
- Key words or phrases in the body of the email text or in email attachments
A filter based on this type of relevancy search can dramatically reduce the number of emails that require subsequent, manual review.
Where email has been sourced from multiple backup tapes, it is likely that duplicates of the same email will exist. For instance, a backup of a user’s mailbox on Monday will contain many of the same emails as a backup of the same mailbox on Tuesday. For this reason it will often be necessary to de-duplicate the emails that fulfil the criteria of the relevancy search, so that only one copy of each, identical document is reviewed. Even the slightest change to an email means that it becomes a ‘new’ document, and is not removed during de-duplication.
In very sophisticated email searching, concept technology or ‘fuzzy logic’ is available to produce emails that are likely to be relevant, despite the fact that they do not contain the exact word that is included in the relevancy search list. (e.g. the word ‘dog’ may be highlighted during a search for the word ‘pet’.)
Palmer Legal Technologies can assist in creating a strategy to produce a reasonable volume of documents from an initially large volume of data, and to maximise the probability of finding key documents in the other side’s document bundle.