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w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 19 index to achieve an effective search. A computer does not search text; it searches an index (which is like a table of contents of all the words in the cor- pus, with links pointing to where the word is in the text). A word that is not in the index will not be available in search, even if you can see it on the page. Make sure all words are available for search (for example, that the documents have been OCRed if they are scanned or unsearchable). And know your "stop words" — these are words that are not indexed because they are common or not known to the computer application doing the indexing. Some indexers can- not recognize foreign characters and some omit punctuation or numbers. 7. Metadata: "Data about data" is "extract- ed" during processing (and text is also extracted into the index). Metadata is used by e-discovery systems to organize data and enable a lot of advanced functionality. While metadata can tell you a lot about the associated data, it is not always conclusive. Generally, metadata can be handed over during production, which means affidavit entries can be prepared using this infor- mation. 8. Threading relates to e-mails only and (using metadata) will pull all e-mails in the same conversation together. Many applications now present this in a sche- matic, so you can "see" the thread and with a simple click expose the indi- vidual e-mails within the conversation. Threading will show if people are added to or dropped off the chain, if there is a change to the subject line or text, or the thread is sent to a new person. It brings e-mail conversations alive. 9. Native production is a term that always refers to post-processed data. It means that during production, instead of mak- ing a document into a tiff image or pdf, the native document you exchange is in a load file, and is accompanied by extracted text and metadata associated with that record as well as (most impor- tantly) the system-generated control number and the hash value. It does not mean you turn over Word or Excel doc- uments that have no control number. Native productions keep the richness of the original and the control (unique numbering) of processed records. 10. Technology-assisted review or pre- dictive coding is a spectrum of technol- ogies that use machine learning togeth- er with human inputs to speed up the classification of documents. Read my January 2012 column on the topic. This technology is getting better every day (except on Excel spreadsheets) and is now accepted practice according to U.S. decisions. Take the time to schedule a demo. It will change your life, if used properly. To my readers: Thank you for your questions and suggestions, which were the source of the subjects I tackled. And next month, this column begins a new chapter: technology and the law. Dera J. Nevin is director of e-discovery at Proskauer Rose LLP. The opinions expressed in this article are her own. Because business issues are legal issues. So if you want to get ahead in business, get the degree that gets you there faster. ONE YEAR – PART - TIME – NO THESIS FOR L AWYERS AND NON - LAWYERS law.utoronto.ca/ExecutiveLLM GPLLM Global Professional Master of Laws [Get a Master of Laws] Untitled-1 1 2015-02-25 8:38 AM

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