MetaLINCS E-Discovery is a commercially available software application that speeds up the process of discovering relevant information within electronic messages and documents, significantly reducing litigation and compliance risks. The MetaLINCS E-Discovery application is designed for use by corporate attorneys, investigators and litigators to make better decisions earlier, enhance discovery productivity, and provide methodological consistency across cases.

MetaLINCS says that according to Kahn Consulting, e-mail has become the primary source of evidence in investigations, comprising more than half of all case evidence, and companies will spend over $4.6 billion in expenses related to e-mail analysis this year.

Mission Critical

“Analysis of message content is the most critical aspect of the E-Discovery process, yet most organizations continue to rely on conventional text search techniques for gathering topical information and reading each document for analysis,” says Metalincs CEO Ramon Nunez. “Law firms and corporate attorneys spend untold hours and dollars manually analyzing e-mail or they outsource e-mail analysis to costly service providers, but often miss critical evidence.”

The MetaLINCS E-Discovery application combines a patent-pending discovery process with a visual representation of the relationships between people, events, time, documents and communication patterns that is designed to make discovery a more efficient process. The approach is designed to enable corporate attorneys, investigators and litigators to quickly gain an understanding of electronic information in context, which leads to more successful investigations, mitigates compliance risks, and reduces discovery and litigation costs.

“The ability to quickly and accurately assess a case and discover specific relevant information contained in e-mails can expedite the decision process in potential legal disputes,” said DuPont manager of litigation support Mary Ann Kim, “MetaLINCS’ analysis capabilities provide an innovative way to optimize the E-Discovery process by minimizing the amount of time spent analyzing key information from our vast stores of e-mail messages.”

MetaLINCS CTO Chuck Williams adds that, "During the E-Discovery review process, e-mails and documents are typically read out-of-context, so when a relevant item or topic is found, search is used to gather related information.” Williams says that this segregated technique often produces errors such as not recognizing the relevance of a message, failing to identify search terms and phrases that would lead to additional relevant information, and missing important people altogether, and that the MetaLINCS software automatically identifies the important concepts and terminology used by the subjects of the investigation and produces a visual representation of correlations between people, time, events and communications.

Rich Discovery Feature Set

The MetaLINCS E-Discovery application combines this set of features to offer what the company sees as a comprehensive E-Discovery analysis software:

• Core Discovery Features, including processing, indexing, search, review, reporting and production.

• Graphic Analysis, which presents visual analysis of people, events, time, documents, concepts and communication patterns.

• People Analysis, which shows a network of the most important people and the communication patterns for any topic, and also reveals unexpected parties and guides investigators to relevant conversations.

• Thread Analysis, identifying the complete set of threads relevant to any topic and organizing them into groups of related threads, or side conversations, and guiding investigators to important messages that might otherwise be missed.

• Related Concepts, which automatically suggests additional key words and phrases to analyze, resulting in speedier and more complete investigation processes without the need for used defined taxonomies.

• Multi-Dimensional Search retrieves relevant messages, documents, threads, people and concepts for any search query.

• Dynamic Directory automatically categorizes results into 8 dimensions.

• Collaboration allows queries and results to be organized, saved in folders, annotated, marked and shared by investigation teams.

• Document Acquisition Engine extracts documents and messages from diverse sources; normalizes, categorizes and indexes information; integrates additional metadata from corporate directories.