When it comes to an industry as niche as eDiscovery and the law in general, there are acronyms and technical jargon around every corner. For those well-established in their legal careers, who witnessed the birth of many of these phrases, they are commonplace and undaunting. To those of us who are new to the industry, however, they are a one-way ticket to confusion and frantic googling.
Here at Altlaw, we are all about making the confusing world of legal technology easy and accessible, as you have seen through our Luddites Guide series. In the spirit of education and lending a helping hand, we have compiled all of our most-used technical phrases into this jargon buster. Hopefully, you can return to this blog whenever you come across a term you are unsure of and amaze your colleagues with your knowledge.
- Batching – Splitting a set of documents into manageable chunks, allowing the system to track progress.
- Boolean Search – The method of searching words or phrases within a single query using NOT/ OR/ AND operators.
- Child Document – A document or file which is embedded within, or attached to another document.
- Clustering - The act of grouping together documents with similar themes.
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- Objective Coding – This can be applied by anyone who is able to read the document. The process of manually determining the metadata of a document such as document type, title/subject, date, author, etc.
- Subjective Coding – Requires an understanding of the document and background of the project. The process of coding for Relevance, Privilege, Issues, etc.Coding – Inputting the information of a document into a field. There are two types of coding: