Civil litigation in this country relies on each side making relevant evidence available to the other, a process known as "discovery". The explosive growth of information in digital form has led to an increasing focus on how search technology can best be applied to balance costs and responsiveness in what has come to be known as "e-discovery".  

This is now a multi-billion dollar business, one in which new vendors are entering the market frequently, usually with impressive claims about the efficacy of their products or services. Courts, attorneys, and companies are actively looking to understand what should constitute best practice, both in the design of search technology and in how that technology is employed. In this talk I will begin with an overview of the e-discovery process. I'll then use that background to motivate a discussion of which aspects of that process the TREC Legal Track sought to model, with a particular focus on two novel aspects of evaluation design: (1) recall-focused evaluation in large collections, and (2) modeling an interactive process for "responsive review" with fairly high fidelity. I'll finish up by talking about some of our most recent work on e-discovery, including work on cost-sensitive design and evaluation of classifiers for responsiveness, development of an interactive tool to support review for privilege, and creation of a new email test collection.