Overcoming the Digital Tsunami in E-Discovery: Is Visual Analysis the Answer? [FNa1]

New technologies are generating potentially discoverable evidence in electronic form in ever increasing volumes. As a result, traditional techniques of document search and retrieval in pursuit of electronic discovery in litigation are becoming less viable. One potential new technological solution to the e-discovery search and retrieval challenge is Visual Analysis (VA). VA is a technology that combines the computational power of the computer with graphical representations of large datasets to enable interactive analytic capabilities. This article provides an overview of VA technology and how it is being applied in the analysis of e-mail and other electronic documents in the field of e-discovery, as well as discussing several challenges and limitations of the technology. The article concludes that VA has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of current search and retrieval techniques, but that addressing the digital tsunami is more likely to be achieved by using VA in combination with other search and retrieval technologies in the context of creating an effective data governance program.