Cataphora - Legal Search Consulting

Legal Search Consulting

Courts and adversaries are taking an increasingly tough look at the way search for e-discovery is done. Simply stipulating likely keywords and culling the data is no longer enough. Without measurement, sampling and expertise, producing parties leave themselves open to accusations of non-compliance and possible sanctions. Cataphora's legal search consulting offerings provide clients with the expertise they need to make full use of our advanced search technologies in a way that is effective and defensible.

We help clients create:

searches with high recall (few missed documents), to meet discovery obligations
precise topical sets of hot documents

We can also:

review keyword proposals to ensure inclusion of essential variants and to point out ambiguities and other potential sources of overgeneration (finding documents that may contain a keyword but which are not, in fact, responsive)
ensure all aliases and name variants are included in actor searches
support multilingual searches and translate search terms
suggest possible keyterms based on data mining and linguistic patterns specific to a corporation or data set
empirically analyze the performance of search strategy proposed by adversaries
narrow search contexts to reduce overgeneration caused by contextual ambiguity (e.g. focus on the content of an email message, and not be sidetracked by standard legal boilerplate that is part of the signature)
evaluate meta-data quality and help select appropriate search targets
organize key terms and variants into re-usable ontologies

And it's not just the defense that can benefit from search expertise. We believe plaintiffs should never cede their rights to the facts by agreeing to naïve keyterm selection. We help plaintiffs ensure the agreed upon keywords and search strategy will yield as complete a production as possible, without getting gigabytes of false positives dumped on them.

Cataphora expertise

Cataphora provides all its clients with the best search and review tools, but even the best tools work better in the hands of experts. No one expects litigators to do forensic accounting; why should it be any different with advance search and retrieval? Our legal search team is familiar (and indeed helps to build) our unique technology. This gives us an unparalleled combination of technical expertise and language instinct.

Our expert Legal Search Consultants have the training in computational linguistics, information retrieval and statistics to understand the many levels of language, but we also have years of experience in litigation and investigation contexts. We've dealt with the tight deadlines, messy productions and unexpected motions. Most importantly we understand how to translate your case strategy into a cost effective search strategy. Unlike other consulting linguistic and search experts, we don't substitute our judgment and understanding for yours. Think of us a trail guide. You tell us what mountain you need to climb and we help you reach the summit with the least risk and effort. We work at your direction, moving quickly to meet your needs, and turning on a dime when strategy changes.

Advanced search technology

It's not just our people that make the difference. Our patented and proprietary search technology has been developed through years of meeting customer search needs in discovery and investigation, driven by our core insight: context is everything. Whether it's our conversation modeling Discussions™ technology, our ability to find and search over email segments or our behavior modeling approach to people search, our technology is about empowering better search, better understanding, through context.

Language is inherently unpredictable. It's creative and ambiguous, complex and context dependent. Our credentialed experts have a deep understanding of language, search technology, and litigation. They are superbly qualified to deliver the advice, support, and execution you need and expect. From before the 26(f), through review, production and trial, our measured, transparent, search keeps overall costs low, and can withstand even the toughest scrutiny.