Enterprise Search And Destroy - Page 2

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Reporter's Notebook: Autonomy, based in San Francisco and Cambridge, England, has taken a more holistic tack, and has married its enterprise search application with a corporate-compliance module that analyzes enterprise information repositories in real time, flags high-risk content and behaviors that may violate compliance policies, and provides an audit trail.

San Francisco-based Recommind uses a technology called probabilistic latent semantic analysis, which looks at words in relationship to each other in context. The newest version of its search platform includes the ability for customers to lock down given documents so that they cannot be edited or destroyed.

The company has also made the application more attractive to potential partners by improving its interoperability with other document-management application vendors.

"It's OEM-ready," in the words of Craig Carpenter, the company's vice president of marketing.

A more specialized application from transcription software vendor Nexidia lets users search voice files (from VoIP calls, for instance) using phonemics, which recognizes differences in regional accents (like the Boston accent that drops the "r" in car).

The market for these products is growing so quickly because of the key role played by discovery in the U.S. legal system: It forces plaintiffs and defendants to put their cards out on the table, forcing a settlement one way or the other. As a result of this process, fewer than 2 percent of federal cases ever go to trial, according to Cliff Shnier, vice president of the litigation group at Aon Consulting.

Companies that fail to provide these documents in a timely manner face the wrath of the courts: Morgan Stanley was saddled with a $1.45 billion settlement, in large part because the judge in the case instructed the jury to take the broker's failure to provide electronic documents as proof that the missing information was damaging to its case.

Several courts had already issued rulings with regards to electronic documents, but awards of the magnitude of the Morgan Stanley case prompted Congress to amend the FRCP to give those precedents force of law.

Changing the FRCP isn't something that happens very often; "since 1938 [when the FRCP was initially passed], the number of times it has been amended can be counted on the fingers of both hands," Shnier said.

The extent to which these rules apply to a company depend to a large extent on the industry in which it operates. For instance, brokers and other financial institutions are required to store voice transcripts, while construction companies are not.

Shnier added that companies are being encouraged to use technology in order to reduce the costs associated with discovery, and to make searching more productive.

"The courts have smiled on the idea of using search technology to cull this down," he said.

Moreover, companies don't have to maintain all their documents forever. According to Shnier, "it's highly recommended that companies have records retention policies" mandating the purging of documents after a given number of days, unless they are deemed potentially discoverable.

"When there's a potential for litigation, the duty to preserve does arise," he noted. That said, "an advisable retention policy gets rid of all inactive documents."