Top-Down/Bottom-Up Analysis Workshop Simon Attfield

The challenge When conduct of a company is brought into question... Investigation - regulatory or prelude to litigation Lawyers search, review, sort and re-represent data A high-recall problem Construct the narratives that matter from unstructured info.... a collaborative sensemaking problem Sensemaking in e-discovery

3 The problem of manual review The problem of ‘information inflation’ – a ‘pulse’ in the history of information [Paul & Baron, 2007] A challenge to effectively identifying the evidentiary record within reasonable constraints of time and cost.

Jeane Thomas, Crowell & Moring (Keynote at DESI II, 2008) Mergers and Acquisitions for AT&T Document requests from US Department of Justice 1996 – 12 to 15 lawyers – 300 boxes of paper 2004 – 125 contract lawyers – reviewed 30 million pages and produced 12 million relevant documents 2005 – 600 lawyers – reviewed 112 million pages and produced 17 million relevant pages ‘Information inflation’ - challenges tractability

Case studies of regulatory investigations at a London law firm.

ThreadsVI The construction of narrative is important. s are units of communication. threads are higher order-units of communication. Investigations are people-centric Wanted... -Visualisation that supported visual indexing by people, s and threads. - Visualisation that showed thread overlap – i.e. faithful to chronology.

The Enron collection In October 2003, US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission placed collection of Enron's internal s from into the public domain as part of its ongoing investigations. ~ 500,000 messages belonging to 158 users - mostly senior management. ~250,000 unique messages. One of the few or only substantial set of s available. Much research has been done with the collection.

11 - Help users shape the flow of information they receive [McNee & Arnette, 2008] - Provide an overview of what’s underneath

Update the dataset and get ThreadsVI going 1.Download Save zip file to Desktop/visualindexesdemo/OUT/ 3.Unzip in that folder (overwrite) 4.Change the screen resolution to 1152 x Go to Desktop\VASS\visualindexesdemo 6.Right click vi-threads.ss 7.Open with Firefox

Task Context Facts – Enron filed for bankruptcy in late 2001 – Largest bankruptcy in history – Many debts and losses were not reported Imaginary Scenario – Enron was funding research at Poppleton University. The money didn’t appear on the books. – You are investigating debts that weren’t declared.

Task – Investigation questions Did Enron give money to Poppleton? If so what/when? Who might be responsible for the accounting decisions? What is your evidence for or against? Who would you like to interview and why? – Meta-questions Record your thinking. What hypotheses did you have? Were they challenged? What representations did you create? What additional tools/functionality would you add?