Briefs

M K Shankar, Deccan Herald, Dec 19, 2007.

As no company wants to attract punishment for corporate malpractices, good business has now become equated with good compliance.

The world of corporate US changed forever after fraud was detected in corporate practices early this decade. Enron and Andersen auditors were involved in corporate fraud and employees of the companies held their breath and peace. They didn�t blow any whistles!

Investigating agencies noted that the presence of e-mails at Andersen and other companies involved that asked the email recipient to destroy documents, was unwarranted. A clear intent of hiding crime based on circumstantial evidence was present.

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With corporate scandals hitting the headlines almost daily, responding to the constant threat of litigation is a prime concern for corporate counsel and law firms alike. This is why discovery and risk assessment are playing an important in large-scale litigation.

This has made data mining a critical application. Search and detect software engines such as Stratify Legal Discovery help in doing this.

According to general manager Parveen Mittal, while normal search algorithms, such as Google Search, are keyword-based, the Stratify engine discovers relationships. eDiscovery can ferret out dubious data and actions that might have been pushed under the carpet by perpetrators of corporate crime.

eDiscovery uses Bayesian statistical methods to look for associations among words and brings together groups of words that have the closest association in a given context.

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