Fios adds concept-based searching to Web-based electronic discovery tool.

Fios, Inc., a provider of electronic discovery services, unveiled recently the newest upgrades to Prevail, the state-of-the-art, Web-based electronic discovery tool, at the LegalTech New York conference. With this product upgrade, Fios will become the first full-service electronic discovery provider to offer concept-based searching capabilities. Fios will deliver advanced data mining, as well as other powerful features, to its client base of top law firms, FORTUNE 100 companies and government investigatory agencies. The new upgrades will be available for client use by the middle of March.

Fios' Prevail is a third-generation, Web-based tool designed to help legal teams manage, search and produce vast amounts of electronic evidence. The concept-based search technology is being added to Prevail via Fios' licensing partnership with Engenium, Corp., developer of the intelligent concept-based search technology called Semetric. Concept-based searching organizes unstructured information by mapping relationships between each word and every other word in large sets of documents. This association of words based on the context in which they are used creates a form of numeric "meaning" and "understanding," which enables users to quickly identify relevant documents and related concepts within vast amounts of data, even if the results contain no words in common with the queries.

"Mining and managing business data effectively and accurately has been a significant and ongoing concern for corporations over the last decade," said Mark Gilbert, Research Director for Content Management at Gartner, Inc. "With the rise of electronic discovery requests in legal cases and government compliance issues, the ability for companies to protect mission-critical data, and at the same time comply with the law, makes this process even more difficult. Electronic discovery providers are key to making this process more efficient for all parties."

Being able to find and review documents that are conceptually related to initial search queries allows legal teams to identify and review relevant documents more quickly and more accurately than traditional search tools. Unlike keyword searching which requires skillful use of Boolean operators like "AND" and "OR," concept searching has no required formatting or syntax--reviewers can enter a natural language query or paste entire paragraphs from a relevant document, and within seconds receive a list of all related documents, ranked by relevancy. The new release of Prevail will also provide the ability to view a list of all conceptually related documents.

"Our addition of concept-based searching provides an optimum solution for legal teams that need to quickly and accurately research vast amounts of data," said Richard A. Lazar, Fios' president and chief executive officer. "Fios has deep technical and legal expertise, and we understand the legal community's need to research, mine and organize data within tight discovery timeframes. And, with 90 percent or more of all new corporate documents created and stored electronically, demand for electronic discovery is growing. With product enhancements such as concept-based searching, we will continue to meet this increased market demand."

According to recent studies, 9.8 billion e-mail messages are composed and sent each day, accounting for about half of all new electronic information created each year. The key benefit of Prevail is that it enables litigation support teams to review and produce more electronic documents in less time. Prevail gives legal teams complete and secure access to electronic data via the Internet, enabling them to quickly gain visibility into e-mail, word processing files, spreadsheets and other electronic documents.

"Electronic discovery has become an important part of our litigation process, especially as the scrutiny of electronic corporate data continues to intensify," said Karin F.R. Moore, Counsel at O'Melveny & Myers, LLP. "Fios is a valued service provider that helps us better serve the needs of our clients. Fios' addition of concept-base searching to its Web-based search services will help us to offer the best representation to our clients in an accurate and timely manner."

An additional new key feature being added to Prevail is the improved ability to review e-mail chains. Prevail users will be able to view the complete context of an e-mail by traversing the e-mail's hierarchy starting from the custodian's original mailbox down through the last nested attachment. Fios' current version of Prevail offers the ability to control document production by creating and managing production sets. Control options include de-duplication, logical grouping, stamping options and spot-checking a preview of the production set before submitting the job to Fios. Flexible list filters, also currently available within Prevail, eliminate redundant work, allowing reviewers to focus on documents that haven't yet been categorized or read. Lists can also be filtered to remove any duplicate documents.

Prevail is the first electronic evidence review tool built using the Microsoft .NET framework and SQL Server 2000, giving it an intuitive and familiar Windows-like interface. Companies using Prevail can quickly designate from one to hundreds of users to concurrently review small or large quantities of data, with capacity measured in megabytes to terabytes. Litigation support team members can also collaborate via Prevail's secure instant messaging. Fios utilizes the most sophisticated technical security for Prevail, including Digital Certificates using 1024-bit keys that support 128-bit SSL encryption, state-of-the-art firewalls and customer-controlled security policies. Because Prevail is hosted by Fios, it requires no client site setup or configuration. The only system requirements for Fios' clients are Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and Windows 98 (or higher). Pricing is based on a per-megabyte basis, thus costs don't vary based on the number of users accessing Prevail, nor the amount of time they spend online.