AskFirst™ E-Discovery
LRC's AskFirst™ E-Discovery software significantly enhances in-house litigation preparation. It allows an organization's internal resources to electronically review, manage, tag and extract metadata from millions of electronic resources, and export them into industry leading litigation production software, such as Concordance and Summation.
This software application allows law departments and law firms to take control of the discovery process and substantially lower the cost of discovery by eliminating the need to send all discovery materials to an outside vendor.
AskFirst™ E-Discovery is built on a unique architecture, utilizing state of the art metadata extraction tools, and directed-graph database technologies. This architecture supports unprecedented performance and scalability, allowing law firms and law departments to manage millions of electronic resources through the discovery process. The application also permits custom defined taxonomies for a given matter, based upon corporate requirements.
Supported Applications and File Formats
AskFirst™ E-Discovery accepts over 225 electronic formats, including: RTF, HTML, Text, Unicode Text, Microsoft Word & Works, WordPerfect, Professional Write, Lotus, WordStar and Macintosh Word Processors, including MacWrite II, Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect. AskFirst™ E-Discovery supports:
- » Spreadsheet applications, including: Lotus, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Works, Quattro
Pro, and SuperCalc. - » Database formats including, Microsoft Access, dBase, and Paradox.
- » Presentation applications, including: Corel, Harvard Graphics, Freelance, and Microsoft
PowerPoint. - » Most graphics formats, including: All Adobe formats, Corel Draw, Group 3 Fax,
PostScript, GIF, JPEG, Kodak, BIT, TIFF + CCITT Group 4 & 4, Visio. - » All leading e-mail applications, including Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Lotus
Groupware, Eudora, Netscape, CCMail, and Unix Mbox. All attachments are processed
like all other electronic resources.
Starting a Project
An electronic discovery project is built based on attorney defined criteria. The application user builds an electronic discovery project that identifies the initial resources for inclusion. Users can identify potential sources of relevant information, which may include:
- » Folders or directories that contain electronic resources, such as word processing files
and spreadsheets; - » E-mail folders that may contain relevant communication. This may include a particular
inbox, public directory, or user archive; - » Individual files or other resources.
Application Analysis
AskFirst™ E-Discovery performs a high-speed pass of the resources for basic metadata details and full text contents. Users can perform mass culling and automatic tagging of resources by using the applications search and tagging tools.
- » This includes full-text searching of resources including e-mail attachments based on
search parameters. Search functionality includes Boolean logic, phrase, wildcard,
word proximity and fuzzy logic. Individual messages or the entire result set can
be tagged. - » AskFirst™ E-Discovery includes metadata extractions tools that support concept
extraction. For example, users can define a taxonomy for a particular matter, or for a
particular set of materials. This may include company and personal names,
geographic locations, dates, legal or domain topics, or other terms and phrases. The
application user has the ability to create their own extraction parameters for client
specific tasks, for example all documents that contain the following letters "RE: ",
"ATT:" "Dear " or "Yours Sincerely" to be classified as "MEMO/LETTER". - » Tools also include metadata searching and tagging. For example, all e-mails sent to
*@enron.com will be tagged and assigned a subjective issue called "Enron e-mail
Correspondence".
A tag can have one or more objective/subjective fields assigned to it for availability in the target litigation system, for example a tag called "Joe Bloggs" has been assigned a field called "WITNESS" and value "Joe Bloggs". All tagged resources with "Joe Bloggs" will contain a field called "WITNESS" and "Joe Bloggs" within target litigation system.
Export to Litigation Support System
Once the culling and tagging is completed, the user can create and export files. Export files are supported by Summation and Concordance, or any generic XML-based custom litigation system.
- » AskFirst™ E-Discovery allows a user to select the tagged information to be exported.
- » AskFirst™ E-Discovery allows a user to define the desired output format, for example TIF or PDF.
Once the export configuration is completed, the automated export process starts. The automated processing tasks include:
- » Extracting metadata
- » Converting every resource to single page TIF or PDF
- » Exporting the metadata, full text and converted resources for the target litigation system.
- » On completion, generates a report of the export breakdown, including the number of
pages, documents, e-mail messages, attachments and document types.
For More Information
Please contact Mazen Haddad, LRC's CIO, at 800-776-9377 or mhaddad@lrci.com, to learn more about LRC's AskFirst™ E-Discovery software.