The issue in Mt. Hawley Ins. Co. v. Felman Production started with a technology glitch that resulted in privileged materials being omitted from the indexes used for privilege review.
“Non-indexed documents pose dangers, but they are dangers you can minimize,” says John Tredennick, CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems. He recommends the following steps:
- After data is loaded, get exception reports that show non-indexed data by file type, and carefully look at the counts.
- Sample the non-indexed data by file type. Does any of the data need optical-character recognition? “Text that is visible to the human eye is sometimes invisible to the computer,” Tredennick adds. “We provide a utility to check the documents for which we could not extract text for indexing. You can see if it may be password-protected or corrupt.”
- When you run searches, be sure to sample the non-hits as well as the hits.
