Monday, August 4, 2008

E-Discovery Faces a Language Barrier

John Tredennick is a lawyer and technologist, but lately he's been worrying about some odd things. Like the fact that Japanese is written with a combination of three different types of scripts, or that many languages run their words together without breaks between them. Trivia like this is usually of interest to linguists, but it has become a serious issue and nuisance for lawyers like Tredennick. That's because litigation is increasingly taking on international components, and legal technologists are struggling to incorporate foreign language documents into litigation.

Legal technology experts say that discovery in languages other than English have only recently begun to flood the system. "It's a trend that's simply exploded. Two years ago, if you'd asked me about foreign language electronic evidence, I would've said, 'yep, it's coming,'" says Tredennick, CEO of Catalyst Repository Systems, an e-discovery vendor. "But since then it's swelled to a flood. Back then I would've said the volume of such evidence was about zero terabytes. Now we see tens of terabytes of documents in languages other than English."




AddThis Social Bookmark Button

No comments: