FTI Technology is sponsoring an EDRM webinar on 23 April (that’s today) called Using FTI Ringtail to Modernise Keyword Search for Efficiency and Better Discovery Outcomes. The presenters are JR Jenkins, senior director of FTI Consulting and Jason Ray, Managing Director of Technology Consulting at FTI. The moderators are George Socha and Tom Gelbmann of EDRM.

The use of simple keywords, or of keywords in combination with other keywords, is a deceptively simple way of searching for documents for eDiscovery / eDisclosure purposes. Lawyers like them, not merely because they seem it easy to define, but because it is a relatively straightforward matter to propose and to try and agree them with opponents

The subject comes up in any conversation about more sophisticated technology – it did so for me a couple of days ago, for example, in a discussion at  law firm about the use of technology-assisted review.

The idea has grown up that keywords are somehow an inadequate alternative to the sophistication of predictive coding and other forms of technology assisted review. One can easily point to the defects of pure keyword searching, which takes no account of misspellings, aliases and synonyms, and which can both miss vital documents and return others which have nothing to do with the desired subject matter.

The subject is not helped by anecdotes of lawyers who want to use their clients’ or opponents’ name as a keyword, notwithstanding that the names recur in almost every email. My favourite is the one about the attempt to use “road” as a keyword in a building dispute when that word appeared in nearly all the emails as part of an address.

The reality is that keywords can be immensely useful when the list is constructed by people who know what they are doing, and in particular when keywords are used in conjunction with other forms of search such as concept clustering. In addition, the more sophisticated forms of search can often help uncover keywords which might otherwise been missed.

I have had many a Ringtail demonstration from FTI’s JR Jenkins, one of the most lucid software demonstrators. In this 60 minute webinar, he and FTI’s Jason Rae will explain how legal teams can maximise the use of keywords both for basic searching and as a component of sophisticated tools like Ringtail’s Document Mapper.

There is more information about this webinar here, together with access to a registration form.

While on the subject of FTI Ringtail, the platform was recently recognised as top online online review platform in the 2015 Best of the National Law Journal Reader Rankings. There is more information about this here, including a note about future webinars, on 12 May and 9 June, which explain how to get the best out of Ringtail.

Whoever looks after FTI’s website has done a good job of setting out the components of this heavyweight application and its associated services, with crisp and easily-navigated sections on the Software and Services, and on Ringtail itself, with subsections explaining both the task-level elements (Predictive Coding, Analytics etc), and the different deployment options (On Premise, SaaS, On Demand, Acuity Managed Review). This is a multi-dimensional subject, and it is not easy to bring all these components together in a way which is easy to follow. FTI has managed that.

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