As any Litigation Support Specialist or experienced eDiscovery lawyer will know, date and keyword searching has been so commoditised over the past years that it seems like there is hardly any point in talking about them. However, we believe that they are!

Clearly since the decisions made during this stage essentially remove documents from review and detailed interrogation, it is important to ensure that both you and your vendor or litigation support manager have the same understanding of what date and keyword searching mean, as well as to know of some of the choices you may not be aware of. Let’s take these in turn, starting with date searching.

Date searching in eDiscovery

Perhaps the simple way to approach date and keyword filtering exercise is to say something like ‘I’d like to see all documents dated between Date A and Date B, containing a Keyword C’.

This approach works when searching a population of standalone, electronic documents. It may not be suitable running the same search across a population of emails and here is why.