Craig Ball not only gives us the gift of alliteration in his latest post, but he also discusses three search consults with clients that he shared with us!

In his post (Seven Stages of Snakebitten Search, available here), Craig discusses his fascination with electronic search and how “because, awful Grinch that I am, I get a kick out of explaining to lawyers why their hard-fought search queries and protocols are doomed to fail.” But, he says: “once we work through the Seven Stages of Attorney E-Discovery Grief: Umbrage, Denial, Anger, Angry Denial, Fear, Finger Pointing, Threats and Acceptance, there’s almost always a workaround to get the job done with minimal wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Craig provides three search consults to illustrate this. They are:

• First, the ask was to search for old CAD/CAM drawings in situ on an opponent’s file servers based on words appearing on drawings.
• Another lawyer sought to run queries in M365 seeking responsive text in huge attachments.
• The last lawyer wanted me to search the contents of a third-party’s laptop for subpoenaed documents but without the machine being imaged or its contents processed before search.

As Craig notes, “each request is unlikely to work as planned”, even though “all these requests seemed perfectly reasonable in the minds of the lawyers involved, and why not?” So, what are the challenges with each of these search consults? I won’t steal Craig’s thunder – you can go to his blog post here for those. It’s his gift to us, I’m just “re-gifting”… 😉

So, what do you think? Do you have any other search challenges you’ve experienced? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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