Context determines meaning, best illustrated by the word “trunk” (trunk of a tree, trunk of a car, trunk of an elephant). Words are the weapons of litigation, and there is always a struggle over the meaning of words contained in the documents, voicemail, chat logs and other forms in which the words have been presevered.
Meaning is at the heart of communication, and words provide the building blocks of meaning. Phrases, paragraphs & entire documents can only be truly understood by determining the context in which they were written. Because our primary interests are typically determining intent and possession, we are interested the words custodians are using in context.
Traditionally, opposing litigants have agreed on keywords. These keywords are run against the sea of words in a litigation dataset. This is the standard method within the industry.
Arguments that the traditional “keyword” approach is a viable solution for extracting meaning out of litigation data is fallacious, because words must be understood in their context to determine their meaning. Keywords lose significant amounts of meaning when they utilized and then presented without context. Here, we present three types of context relevant to investigation in litigation.
Situational Context. Metadata allows us to investigate a sea of words in a litigation data set for thier situational context. What is the situational context of the custodian? Did the custodian possess the document? How did they utilize the language in the document? To whom did they send the document? Most important, why did they send the document? What was their intent?
Verbal Context. What are the surrounding documents saying? What is the substance of these communications? Why do these communications contain certain keywords? Merely stabbing at a dataset with keywords cannot establish answers to these questions.
Social Context. What are the social variables? How do custodians communicate, in terms of culture and style? How does the social relationship look between the custodian and her colleagues? How much dialogue is occurring between specific parties? Is dialogue kept internally, or is it being shared with others?
A New Solution
We can leverage document metadata and content to help establish context for words and documents in which they appear. Prior to the meet and confer, we can select one or more of the key custodians in the matter, and index their e-mail and electronic office files utilizing a tool like Clearwell. Clearwell builds discussion threads around e-mail, presents linguistic-based “topics”, and builds a host of document filters. With these tools at our disposal, we can quickly and deeply understand the situational and verbal context of key words.
Visit www.therainmachine.com to schedule a Clearwell presentation.
