Across the globe, legal, business and technical practitioners charged with managing
information are continually challenged by rapid-fire evolution and growth in the legal
and technology fields. In the United States, new compliance requirements,
amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and corresponding case
law, along with technical advances, have made litigation support one of the most
exciting professions in the legal arena. In the UK, revisions to the Practice Direction
to CPR Rule 31 require parties in civil litigation to consider the impacts associated
with electronic documents.
One emerging technology trends—both aiding and complicating the management of
electronically stored information (ESI) in litigation in the US, EU and UK alike—is
the notion of “conceptual search.” This paper focuses on the evolution of conceptual
search technology, and predictions of where this science will take legal professionals
and technical information managers in coming years and a look at the advantages
conceptual search can provide in dealing with the issue of language.
This paper will focus primarily and the latent semantic analysis approach to
conceptual search and why this approach is advantageous when searching ESI
regardless of the language used in the documents, even to the extent of allowing for
cross language searching and accurate searching of documents that contain co-mingle
foreign terms with the native language
