I have referred before to a paper which I wrote for Equivio called Equivio Themes: shifting the eDiscovery focus back to lawyers looking for evidence. It has now been published on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel site. The immediate context is Equivio Themes, an interesting new software application (part of Equivio Zoom) designed to help lawyers quickly pick out the important themes (thus the name) from large document collections. The thrust of the paper, however, is the words “lawyers looking for evidence” which appears in its title.

The emphasis on process and on the mechanics of achieving eDiscovery / eDisclosure in compliance with ever-stricter court rules and tighter deadlines is important for all sorts of reasons; it has, however, somehow made us lose sight of the fact that what we are looking for is the evidence to support our cases and undermine those of opponents. That is what Equivio Themes is designed to do.

The processes are important; the objective is more so.