More Effective Keyword Searches

Law Technology News has advice on crafting more effective keyword searches for electronic data discovery. Several federal judges have noted the need for lawyers to consult expert guidance, and in previous blog posts we've written about the need think about your search terms.

The author identifies the following as key to successful keyword searches:

1. start with the request for production;
2. seek input from key players;
3. look at what you've got and the tools you'll use;
4. communicate and collaborate;
5. incorporate misspellings, variants, synonyms;
6. filter and de-duplicate first;
7. test, test, test!;
8. review the hits;
9. tweak the queries and retest; and
10. check the discards.

Most Dangerous Search Terms

CNN.com reports the risks of some terms when searching on the Internet. In an article titled What are the most dangerous search terms on the Internet, based on a report by McAfee, you can find out what words, used as search terms on the Internet, pose a higher risk of acquiring virus or other malware on your computer.

If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."

A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks. The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask -- and analyzed 413,000 Web pages.

Adequate Search Terms Are Important

Via Legal Technology Blog, a great post titled Wake-Up Call on Slipshod Search Terms, discusses the important of proper search terms. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew. J. Peck recently issued,

a self-styled "wake-up call" to members of the bar in the Southern District. Instead of attorneys designing keywords without adequate information "by the seat of their pants," Peck appealed for keyword formulations based on careful thought, quality control, testing and cooperation.

Further, Magistrate Judge Peck, in an order of William A. Gross Constr. Assoc., Inc. v. Am. Mfr. Mut. Ins. Co., 256 F.D.R. 134, 2009 WL 724954 (S.D.N.Y. March 19, 2009) endorsed

Magistrate Judge Grimm's description of the proper procedure for devising search keywords. He emphasized in a footnote that what is required is more than a lawyer's guesses, without any quality control testing to ensure the search results are minimally overinclusive or underinclusive for responsive e-mails.

A plug for the Pace Law Library, take a moment to listen to the law library podcast Food for Thought: Generating Search Terms.

Wake-Up Call on Slipshod Search Terms--Is Google Making You a Lazy Researcher?

This article from New York Law Journal reports on a recent case where the judge admonished the lawyers for their inability to do efficient keyword searching to retrieve relevant emails and other electronically stored information (ESI). Judge Andrew J. Peck, U.S. Magistrate Judge (S.D.N.Y.), said this

should serve as a wake-up call to the Bar in this District about the need for careful thought, quality control, testing, and cooperation with opposing counsel in designing search terms or "keywords" to be used to produce emails or other electronically stored information ("ESI"). While this message has appeared in several cases from outside this Circuit, it appears that the message has not reached many members of our Bar.

He goes on to say that this

is just the latest example of lawyers designing keyword searches in the dark, by the seat of the pants, without adequate (indeed, here, apparently without any) discussion with those who wrote the emails.

And concludes with this

Electronic discovery requires cooperation between opposing counsel and transparency in all aspects of preservation and production of ESI. Moreover, where counsel are using keyword searches for retrieval of ESI, they at a minimum must carefully craft the appropriate keywords, with input from the ESI's custodians as to the words and abbreviations they use, and the proposed methodology must be quality control tested to assure accuracy in retrieval and elimination of "false positives." It is time that the Bar - even those lawyers who did not come of age in the computer era - understand this.

I'll put in a plug here for our podcast on this topic. Lucie Olejnikova and Vicky Gannon's Food for Though: Generating Search Terms discusses some helpful ideas on how to generate search terms for your research.