Concept search is the ability to associate concepts between emails and other data structures. More information on concept search and spherical indexing is at www.estorian.com/blog. For example, "doing business with someone in Los Angeles" is a concept. An email about the "weather in Los Angeles" would not be included in the concept of "business in Los Angeles." In early case assessment, you may need to retrieve all email and documents related to 10 custodians and business they did in Los Angeles. The result may yield several new custodians and other business related concepts to evaluate. Counting on your users to remember details from a meeting in 2006 while in Los Angeles may yield little if any information.
Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval". The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk.
Estorian LookingGlass uses a multi-step process to ensure your email data and attachments are at the ready for exploration and early case assessment. The multi-step process results in individual overlapping SQL tables. The multi-step process includes interception, pre-process, parsing, filtering, word stem'ing, and the addition of data to the LookingGlass metabase. Due to the confidential nature of these steps we can not expand on the internal activity. However, the system of tables in SQL is very stable and easily recoverable according to Ron Higgins, Chief Strategy Officer.
Higgins cites an example with a client where the server hosting the LookingGlass SQL system was brought down due to a virus. The client was required to reinstall SQL and they simply reattached the database to the SQL server. While the SQL server was offline, the LookingGlass interception process continued to gather email in the interceptor queue, resulting in over fifty thousand messages buffered. Although the system was offline, the indexing continued to build from the endpoint of the previous failure.
If you are facing legal risk and you need to evaluate your email during the collection and preservation phase, LookingGlass offers an immutable storage system with expansive search capabilities built on a Spherical Indexing system. Spherical Indexing encourages you to beyond fixed Boolean searches. Expand your legal risk management system to include 360 degree custodian and concept evaluation by using Estorian LookingGlass and Spherical Indexing.