As any Litigation Support Specialist or experienced eDiscovery lawyer will know, date and keyword searching has been so commoditised over the past years that it seems like there is hardly any point in talking about them. However, we believe that they are!
Clearly since the decisions made during this stage essentially remove documents from review and detailed interrogation, it is important to ensure that both you and your vendor or litigation support manager have the same understanding of what date and keyword searching mean, as well as to know of some of the choices you may not be aware of. Let’s take these in turn, starting with date searching.
Date searching in eDiscovery
Perhaps the simple way to approach date and keyword filtering exercise is to say something like ‘I’d like to see all documents dated between Date A and Date B, containing a Keyword C’.
This approach works when searching a population of standalone, electronic documents. It may not be suitable running the same search across a population of emails and here is why.
Consider the following scenario: the covering letter is dated between Date A and Date B, and it contains the phrase ‘see attached’. The attachment, which is dated outside of the Date A and Date B range, does contain the Keyword C. Neither the email, nor the attachment will be returned by the search as expressed earlier. The same would be true should the attachment fall within the date range and the covering letter contained the Keyword C. Now, depending on what it is you are hoping to find, this may be a good or a bad thing, which is the first point I would like you to consider. This leads on to the next point, keywords.
