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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract of article from Ralph Losey
We participated in one of several TREC programs in both 2015 and 2016, the one closest to legal search, called the Total Recall Track. The leaders, administrators of this Track were Professors Gordon Cormack and Maura Grossman. They also participated each year in their own track.
One of the core purposes of all of the Tracks is to demonstrate the robustness of core retrieval technology. Moreover, one of the primary goals of TREC is:
[T]o speed the transfer of technology from research labs into commercial products by demonstrating substantial improvements in retrieval methodologies on real-world problems.
Our participation in TREC in 2015 and 2016 has demonstrated substantial improvements in retrieval methodologies. That is what we set out to do. That is the whole point of the collaboration between the Department of Commerce and Department of Defense to establish TREC.
The e-Discovery Team has a commercial interest in participation in TREC, not a defense or police interest. Although from what we saw with the FBI’s struggles to search email last year, the federal government needs help. We were very unimpressed by the FBI’s prolonged efforts to review the Clinton email collection. I was one of the few e-discovery lawyers to correctly call the whole Clinton email server “scandal” a political tempest in a teapot. I still do and I am still outraged by how her email review was handled by the FBI, especially with the last-minute “revelations.”
