Category Archives: Uncategorized
Forensic Linguistic Investigation as a Risk Mitigation Strategy
Tap, tap, tap…Is this thing still on? Yes? Excellent. Blogs can be like laundry. When you get busy with life and work and things, laundry and blogs are the first sacrificial lambs on the alter of Time. Laundry piles up … Continue reading
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ESI Investigation 101: Finding the company big mouth.
I talk a lot about the difference between document review and document investigation, but today I’m going to start the first in a series of posts that give some pointers on investigative techniques that can help those of you who … Continue reading
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Tagged document review, ediscovery, forensic text investigation, linguistics, smoking gun
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The World Doesn’t Need Another Document Review Platform and Other Hard Truths, by Betsy Barry and Suzanne Smith.
WARNING !! IF YOU ARE CONTENT WITH RELYING ON MASSIVE REVIEW EFFORTS TO RACK UP BILLABLE HOURS TO PROP UP YOUR BOTTOM LINE, STOP READING NOW. IF YOU ARE CONTENT WITH RELYING ON MASSIVE REVIEW EFFORTS IN A MISGUIDED ATTEMPT … Continue reading
Storytelling, Linguistics & ESI: All the Better to Win Your Case With My Dear, By Suzanne Smith.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the powerful and suggestive smoking gun document. At the risk of repeating myself, a smoking gun document is the Holy Grail of document investigation. And you should certainly put yourself in the best … Continue reading
The Lure of the Smoking Gun: Use Linguistics not Luck to Find Your Best Evidence, By Suzanne Smith.
“We rushed into the captain’s cabin . . . there he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic . . . while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.” Used to mean indisputable … Continue reading
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Tagged document review, ediscovery, forensic text investigation, linguistics, smoking gun
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I Love Words, or Why a Lawyer Needs a Linguist, by Suzanne Smith*
Why does a lawyer need a linguist? Lawyers are master wordsmiths. We spend years honing the fine art of persuasion. Rhetoric, logic, oral and written arguments. We spend the first year of law school learning how to write persuasively, how … Continue reading
eDiscovery in 2015: Predicting the Unpredictable
I’ve been mulling over my eDiscovery predictions for 2015 and I realized that they represent more of a “wish list” than anything. Suffice it to say, I feel like we have a lot of ground to cover with respect to … Continue reading
The ghost of Discovery past.
I’m going to start out today’s post with an exercise in stating the obvious: Technology is a central part of Discovery in the legal profession. Indisputably so. Take away computers and hardware and software and automated processes and all the … Continue reading
eDiscovery and Linguistics: Strange bedfellows?
If there’s one thing that a dozen years in eDiscovery has shown me, it’s that there is a range of expertise that bolsters this industry. There are the usual suspects: IT expertise, digital forensic science expertise, legal tech expertise, legal … Continue reading
Document Review versus Document Investigation: Apples to Oranges.
In my last post I asserted that document review and large-scale, discovery-driven text investigation are not the same thing. I said that comparing the two is like equating combing the beach with metal detector with an archaeological dig. Now I … Continue reading
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