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Written by Vandana Sharma

Monday, 12 November 2007 00:00

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Stratify Legal Discovery Service (SLDS) is an electronic discovery tool platform that assists all those who have to deal with a sea of data to arrive at the most relevant data. Let us explore how SLDS makes unstructured data more actionable.

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.”—Marshall McLuhan, also known as the Oracle of the Electronic Age

these words truly carry a lot of insight. In the present digital age, we are witnessing a communication and information influx that has led to huge volumes of

E-discovery—the advent

The first e-discovery technology introduced in the 1980s involved scanning hard copy documents and displaying them electronically as images that could be transmitted and stored electronically. Electronic display, however, did not solve the problems with hard copy document review; it just substituted one linear medium for another. Optical character recognition software emerged next, which was able to extract the text of documents so they could be indexed and searched. With the subsequent addition of database programs, reviewers were able to code (or tag) documents for particular issues.

Reviewers could search for and review documents (both those originally in hard copy, as well as native electronic documents and e-mail) for phrases such as “statute of limitation” and tag them appropriately. The original documents remained untouched.

As the quantity of data involved grew, more sophisticated technologies began to emerge.

structured and unstructured data for us to handle and manage, day in and day out. To make sense out of data that is spread out over the network, we may end up losing much time in classifying, deciphering and extracting the relevant information from it. Modern applications or tools to manage and interpret data have become more of a necessity than a tech fad. Electronic discovery (also called
e-discovery) is one such process, in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched for, with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case.

Stratify Inc’s latest offering, Stratify Legal Discovery Service (SLDS), is one such e-discovery solution, available both as a product, as well as an ASP (application service provider) service. Many law firms and corporate houses in the US are using it “…to efficiently organise document collections, flag privilege and prevent inadvertent waiver, find key documents and players, and track productions and matters—all within an intuitive, high-productivity review and analysis application that requires no software installation or maintenance,” reveals Karthik Gopalan, senior manager, Technical Services, Stratify Software India Pvt Ltd.

Designed specially keeping the requirements of attorneys and the corporate sector in mind, Stratify offers advanced analytical capabilities that enable users to efficiently slice-and-dice the document universe, as well as use e-mail maps to explore complex e-mail collections. Stratify’s Email Analytics intuitively provides the road map for discovering ‘who knew what, and when’.

From internal investigations to litigation preparedness, the ambit of this technology application is tremendous.

Gopalan says, “Stratify software solutions provide a platform where attorneys can review documents, classify them, redact privileged information, mark records for production to opposing counsel, export metadata, etc. SLDS provides law firms the ability to design their review strategy and implement the review workflow.”

Previously named ‘Purple Yogi’, the firm was co-founded in September 1999 by Rakesh Mathur, Ramesh Subramonian and Ramana Venkata, who is also the CEO of the firm. In 2003, it moved into the Electronic Data Discovery space and was renamed Stratify Inc. Stratify has its headquarters in Mountain View (CA), USA and has an office in Bangalore too.

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