Litigation Support

It was a great pleasure last week to have lunch with our friend and colleague, Jason Baron, who has often been dubbed "The King of Search."  For those who may not know Jason, he is the Director of Litigation at the National Archives and very well known for his involvement with the Text Retrival Conference (TREC).

As Jason tells it, he was sitting in a room with 25 other lawyers plodding one by one through Presidential e-mails screening for relevance and privilege for an e-discovery request when it struck him that there simply had to be a better way. For years, he said, he looked for the best search tool only to find that he was on a quest for the Holy Grail.

It finally dawned on him that he had been asking the wrong question. Rather than asking "What is the best search tool?" he should have been asking "What is the best search process?" Jason wasn't the only one surprised by the results of TREC, which have shown that a well-constructed Boolean search does as well as anything else when searching for responsive data. But it is well known that searching alone (no matter what tool is used) will only return some of the responsive data.

Testing and sampling are critical, as are all the stages of early case assessment, defining key players, timelines, etc. And the first batch of data frequently suggests a second line of inquiry, which may suggest a third, etc. It's a complicated process, especially in a petabyte world.

As always, Jason was a witty lunch companion (insisting that he could share with us only one of his twelve jokes). His mind moves so fast that sometimes he totally lost track of the ultimate destination of his thoughts. That happens to me too Jason, but I think it is simply that colliding brain cells produce a logical train wreck. :-)

After an engaging lunch in which we thoroughly discussed and deplored the state of ESI education in law schools and law firms, Jason kindly gave us a tour of the National Archives. The Rotunda in which the Charters of Freedom (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) are held are as imposing as I had remembered.

Jason shared lots of tidbits relating to the documents. The one which most fascinated John and I is that, in the event that a nuclear castrophe is imminent, the push of a button will cause the encased Charters of Freedom to retract and be transported mechanically within 30 seconds to a vault capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. I confess we were pleased to think that these documents, which represent the best of the American ideal, would survive. Perhaps we'd pay closer attention to the words if we had a second chance.

And after that solemn moment, we went to the bookstore where one of the best selling items is a photo of President Nixon meeting with Elvis Presley, who had initiated the meeting suggesting that he wanted to be some sort of federal agent-at-large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. An odd candidate for such a position (he didn't get it). Interesting that with a shop full of cool things to buy, pop culture was still (forgive me) King.

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