Legal Technology
In a Discovery Bind, Calif. Law Firm Created FIND Process
Posted Mar 17, 2008, 09:29 am CST
By Martha Neil
When a client of a Silicon Valley law firm balked at the expected seven-figure cost of searching through 100 million files, Fenwick & West found another way to deal with the discovery issue.
It put an in-house IT team to work on the problem of culling through the files to find relevant documents, and the group developing a customized software search application, reports Computerworld. Learning by trial and error, the group eventually developed a proprietary process, over five years, that uses 75 different software tools, most of them little-changed from the standard version. The firm calls the process FIND, short for File Identification Narrowed by Definition.
"Some of the ideas that became the FIND process we discovered during that [first] case, but we really refined it in the past couple of years," says Matt Kesner, the 250-lawyer firm's chief technology officer. "It's become a regular process for us in the past two years."