Extract from Ralph Losey’s article “Judge Goes Where Angels Fear To Tread: Tells the Parties What Keyword Searches to Use”
John Facciola was one of the first e-discovery expert judges to consider the adequacy of a producing parties keyword search efforts in United States v. O’Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14 (D.D.C. 2008). He first observed that keyword search and other computer assisted legal search techniques required special expertise to do properly. Everyone agrees with that. He then reached an interesting, but still somewhat controversial conclusion: because he lacked such special legal search expertise, and knew full well that most of the lawyers appearing before him did too, that he could not properly analyze and compel the use of specific keywords without the help of expert testimony. To help make his point he paraphrased Alexander Pope‘s famous line from An Essay on Criticism: “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
