Searching Deposition Transcripts in Concordance

Given today’s volume of electronic discovery, review software such as LexisNexis Concordance^® is the only way to filter down to relevant material.  Concordance^® applies the same searching, tagging and annotation tools to electronic court reporting transcripts, allowing them to be searched, issue coded and digested along with the underlying documents.    

In an antitrust case involving browsers, for example, we may want to search the deposition transcripts for browser. 

This windows the set to four transcripts; note that hits are highlighted in red (jump to hits using NextHit / PreviousHit in the BROWSE Toolbar), and LiveNote™ QuickMarks are in the margin. 

To narrow the search to a significant date, add 1995 to the prior search.  Instead of retyping, open REVIEW and reference your prior search by number, then add the subset term:  1 and 1995. 

To be able to pull these relevant transcripts quickly, you may want to Tag them.  Open the Tags Task Pane, and create the tag Relevant – Browser by right-clicking and selecting New – Tag.  After entering the tag name, right-click again to select Tag all documents in query.  

To look for a phrase, such as Sun’s Java Security Council, open the Search Task Pane and type or copy that phrase into the box headed with the exact phrase, and hit the Search button. 

This also automatically maps around any stopwords in the phrase.  Note the yellow highlighted and underscored text above our hit.  That is a Note; Concordance^® can jump right to a note.

To create a Note, select a block of significant text and right-click to select New Note.  Notice the Issues list is an exact replica of the document-level Tags; these identify a relevant piece of text.  Select or create an Issue tag and type a comment; the Attachment tab allows you to browse out to hot-link a document or URL. 

By:  Andy Kass – Director, Technical Services - Concordance and LiveNote Certified Software Trainer