Spoiled by Google and legal research, lawyers are woefully unprepared for the difficulty of search in electronic data discovery. Search fails us in two, non-exclusive ways: Our query will not retrieve the information we seek, and our query will retrieve information we didn’t seek.
Obviously, we want what we’re looking for (high recall) and only what we are looking for (high precision). Recall and Precision aren’t friends. Every time Recall has a tea party, Precision crashes with his biker buddies and breaks the dishes. It’s easy to achieve a high recall of responsive electronically stored information. You simply grab it all: 100% of the data = 100% recall. The challenge is achieving precision. If one out of every hundred items returned is what you seek, 99 items are duds — 1% precision stinks.
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