E-Disclosure Viewed as 'Sensemaking' With Computers: The Challenge Of 'Frames'

Simon Attfield/Ann Blandford1

In addressing the question of the design of technologies for the purposes of e-disclosure (this includes the term e-discovery, as used in some jurisdictions) it is essential to recognize that people and technology interact as a complex whole. Technology can promote disclosure and support the ability of people to make sense of data, but the extent to which it is able to do this depends upon the extent to which it naturally extends the way that legal practitioners think and work. This paper describes research undertaken at University College London, which uses this as a starting point for empirical studies with the intention of influencing the design of supporting technologies. A field study comprised interviews with lawyers who worked on a large regulatory investigation. Using data from this study, the document review and analysis is described in terms of a sequence of transitions between different kinds of representation. The paper focuses on one particular transition: the development of a chronology from the documents. The authors consider the idea that investigators make sense of evidence by the application of conceptual 'frames',2 but whilst the investigator 'sees' the situation in terms of these frames, the system 'sees' the situation in terms of documents, textual tokens and metadata. T...

If you are already a vLex customer, Access Here