Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | L I T I G A T I O N A N D P R A C T I C E S U P P O R T 59 C O N Q U E R I N G E M A I L I N E D I S C O V E R Y : H O W D A T A A N A L Y T I C S A R E C H A N G I N G T H E G A M E Added benefits of email threading A powerful benefit of email threading that may not be obvious is what it can do to power "name normalization" capabilities. Name normalization is the process of consolidating various aliases, email addresses, or name variations representing a single entity that may vary throughout a dataset. Name normalization rightly strikes fear in the hearts of anyone that's had to work through the drudgery of cleaning up name values in a privilege log, but with email threading, these cleanup activities may soon be a thing of the past. Why? The backbone of threading solutions is to understand email headers in order to establish relationships between email messages. In this work of parsing and understanding email headers, the system can actually learn a great deal about email participants, including different formulations of display names and email addresses, aliases, maiden names, and even other related email addresses, such as personal email addresses. When this information is cultivated, you can systematically create and associate clean "normalized names" for document populations and even identify the presence of individuals in earlier lower down in an email thread. For this reason, threading can help minimize dangerous mistakes by increasing the context surrounding a conversation and highlighting inconsistencies. This isn't a perfect process. Challenges can arise when you have numerous branches of communication happening within a single threaded conversation, where each branch may need its own treatment and consideration. Inclusive message indicators are helpful, but it can be complicated keeping this context top of mind as you make surgical QC and production decisions, so users must be aware. • Fact discovery/investigations: When your mission is determining "who knew what when," focusing on inclusive messages can provide all of the unique information you need, allowing you to be targeted in what you review and reference. A limitation with an "inclusive only" approach, however, is that it is rather two dimensional. It's difficult to broaden the investigation as you discover pertinent information that might enable you to better understand who various individuals are and what other documents may relate to them. Some leading analytics platforms help address this limitation by providing a deeper dive into an email participant, including other related communications to or from someone of interest with just a few quick clicks from the document viewer. E M A I L PA R T I C I PA N T P R O F I L E S

• Cover