In addressing the question of the design on technologies for e-discovery it is essential to recognise that
such work takes place through a system in which both people and technology interact as a complex
whole. Technology can promote discovery and insight and support human sensemaking, but the
question hangs on the extent to which it naturally extends the way that legal practitioners think and
work. We describe research at UCL which uses this as a starting point for empirical studies to inform
the design of supporting technologies. We report aspects of an interview field study with lawyers who
worked on a large regulatory investigation. Using data from this study we describe document review
and analysis in terms of a sequence of transitions between different kinds of representation. We then
focus on one particular transition: the creation of chronology records from documents. We develop the
idea that investigators make sense of evidence by the application of conceptual ‘frames’ (Klein et al’s,
2006), but whilst the investigator ‘sees’ the situation in terms of these frames, the system ‘sees’ the
situation in terms of documents, textual tokens and metadata. We conclude that design leverage can be
obtained through the development of technologies that aggregate content around investigators’ frames.
We outline further research to explore this further
