I am delighted to say that Brainspace has become the latest sponsor of the eDisclosure Information Project.

Brainspace creates machine-learning software designed to analyze massive amounts of unstructured data very quickly. Brainspace explores data – not just words and phrases, but also their context and meaning — dynamically identifying and organising documents into related clusters so that the user can immediately focus on exploration and learning.

The Brainspace tagline is Augmenting Investigative Intelligence, emphasising that human input is a critical component in the exploration. Brainspace builds clusters without human intervention. Its Concept Cluster Wheel groups documents by conceptual similarity much like a map and, as with a map, the user can navigate to neighbouring clusters. There is a page about this here.

David Nichols, Director of Business Development and Solutions Architecture for Brainspace in London, gave me a demonstration at Legaltech in New York. The example which stuck in my head, as it was doubtless intended to, concerned the topical subject of Theresa May’s enthusiasm for Brexit. A Brainspace search of press cuttings around the time of the referendum shows almost no mention of Theresa May’s name prior to David Cameron’s fall. Thereafter, she shows a keen interest in the topic. If you translate that kind of exploration into a conventional eDiscovery investigation, you can see how evidence or, at least, interesting lines of enquiry, can appear from the data.

This ability to detect things – people, issues, discussion-points and the like – becomes increasingly vital when instructed in litigation or (perhaps even more acutely) when a compliance issue or regulatory investigation arises. When did this start happening? When did anyone first know about it? Who was involved? Who were they talking to? These are all questions to which a prompt answer is needed because if you know them early, you might be able to head off the problem entirely or, by quick reaction, damp it down before it becomes a cause of much expense and trouble.

CMS has recently taken Brainspace and its press release shows considerable enthusiasm at the prospect of using it.

As this article explains, Taylor Wessing, another leading firm in the use of technology, has also taken Brainspace.

I look forward to finding out more about the practical application of Brainspace by firms like this and about use cases within and beyond conventional discovery.

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