Aphelion Insider

Michael Geske, Aphelion’s COO, is participating as a Topic Authority in TREC Legal Track 2009. TREC is the Text Retrieval Conference, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, in cooperation with the Department of Defense. Each year’s program presents a set of tasks to vendors of litigation document searching products and evaluates their performance. The exercise is intended to develop industry best practices and articulate standards for evaluating search and retrieval methods. The tasks are modeled on real life circumstances that arise when litigants face the task of collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing large amounts of electronically stored information, taking into account The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery. The project’s significance has been judicially recognized:

[T]here is room for optimism that as search and information retrieval methodologies are studied and tested, this will result in identifying those that are most effective and least expensive to employ for a variety of ESI discovery tasks. Such a study has been underway since 2006, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, embarked on a cooperative endeavor with the Department of Defense to evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of search methodologies. This project, known as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), evolved into the Trec LegalTrack, a research effort aimed at studying the e-discovery review process to evaluate the effectiveness of a wide array of search methodologies. This evaluative process is open to participation by academics, law firms, corporate counsel and companies providing ESI discovery services…. The goal of the project is to create industry best practices for use in electronic discovery. This project can be expected to identify both cost effective and reliable search and information retrieval methodologies and best practice recommendations, which, if adhered to, certainly would support an argument that the party employing them performed a reasonable ESI search, whether for privilege review or other purposes.

Victor Stanley Inc. v. Creative Pipe, 250 F.R.D. 251, 260 n.10 (D. Md. 2008). Additional information on TREC Legal Track is available here.