Catalyst Adds Foreign Languages, Enhanced Workflow Capabilities and Dynamic Filtering to Catalyst CR 6.1

April 10, 2007; 01:46 AM
Moving forward with its Litigation 2.0 Enhancement roadmap, Catalyst Repository Systems today announced the launch of Catalyst CR 6.1, the newest version of its hosted review and litigation support platform.

“We’re releasing three major initiatives with Catalyst CR 6.1 to meet litigants’ needs for improved review team effectiveness,” noted John Tredennick, Catalyst’s CEO. “The first is support for 70 foreign languages including CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean and Thai) which are some of the most difficult to handle. The second is the substantial enhancement of our review pages. We designed the latter to make large scale review more efficient through faster paging, hot keys and required fields,” he added. “Lastly, we have added dynamic filtering. When a user runs a search, he or she can drill down dynamically using the filters for authors, recipients, date ranges and other criteria.”

Foreign Language Support

Catalyst CR 6.1 now supports more than 70 foreign languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai, commonly referred to as “CJK.” The latter are pictorial languages that do not follow the common spacing and punctuation rules common to most Western languages and thus require a different approach to identifying words and phrases.

Specifically, tokenization (word segmentation) for Asian languages requires special treatment. These languages do not allow text to be split into word entities by referring to whitespace or other separators. Asian language text needs to be split into tokens that can be treated as words during document processing and matching.

Catalyst’s search engine, FAST Instream, supports the special tokenization required to handle these Asian languages. “We chose FAST because they knew languages inside out,” stated Bruce Kiefer, Catalyst’s V.P of Operations and head of R&D. “They are a Norwegian public company and have been supporting a wide variety of languages from the beginning. They even support both versions of Norwegian, Norwegian A and B.”

Supported languages also include: French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Thai. Catalyst supports a broad number of other languages which can be reviewed at www.catalystsecure.com/languages.

Catalyst CR is unique in that its search engine, FAST Instream, supports the search and review of multiple languages in a single repository. Most systems require that each language be contained in a single repository, e.g., Japanese in one, Chinese in another and English in yet another. The end result of this segmentation is that users have to run parallel queries against all of the language repositories and try to combine the results of all their searches.

“Most litigators are not going to put up with a system that requires them to run multiple searches,” noted John Tredennick, who spent more than 20 years as a trial lawyer and litigation partner for a national law firm. “Litigation documents, especially email, often contain multiple languages. If you can’t search everything in one go and view your results across all languages, what’s the point?”

Because Catalyst CR was rewritten in Unicode, it supports review fields that can handle any language. “We have users from all parts of the world,” explains Larry Barela, Catalyst’s CTO. “They want and need to be able to review documents using their native languages. We often see review pages with a mixture of many languages so we rebuilt Catalyst CR to support it across the board.”

“It became critical for us to have foreign language support for our customers with global litigation teams so they can have information available instantaneously regardless of the language,” said Brian Nimmo, CMO & SVP Corporate Business Development, Aptara (formerly Whitmont). “Catalyst offers the ability to cut through the language barrier by supporting documents and Native Files with foreign languages in the same repository.”

Enhanced Review Pages

Catalyst CR 6.1 also includes substantial enhancements for its review pages. Along with being rewritten to support Unicode (the lingua franca for all foreign languages), the developers added hot key support, required fields, conditional fields and built using AJAX technology, which Google made popular with Google Maps and Google Suggest.

“We are excited about putting AJAX technology to work,” explained Larry Barela, Catalyst’s CTO. “We chose it not just because it was cutting edge and a fundamental part of Web 2.0, but rather because it enhances review and system speed. Making pages appear more quickly means reviewers can get more work done. All of this translates to lower costs, more productivity and the ability to meet tight deadlines.”

New review features released in CR 6.1 include:

Hot Keys that allow reviewers to move from page to page or to jump from field to field without using the mouse. Hot keys can be customized for individual fields and allow the reviewer to move rapidly from document to document with a simple keyboard command.

Required Fields: Administrators can designate certain fields on a review as required. This helps ensure consistency in the review process.

Conditional Fields: These are fields that appear after another value is selected and can be made required as well. For example, when a document is marked privileged, a conditional field called privilege type will appear and the reviewer will be required to select a value.

Document Level Audit Trails: Reviewer activities for each document are now tracked at the field level with information about changed values provided. Users can see document history for each document by viewing the audit link on the document.

Dynamic Filtering

CR 6.1 also includes new dynamic filtering functionality that will help users drill down on search results. “This is exciting technology for our clients,” noted Larry Barela. “We typically deal in large document sets and searches can bring back thousands of documents. Dynamic filters let the user quickly how many relate to a particular issue or who the lead author was. You can drill down on that criteria and then filter by other criteria.”

Dynamic filtering technology has been used regularly by e-merchandisers on their web sites. When a user selects HDTV’s as a category, the site quickly summarizes the offerings by brand, price range and other criteria. It makes it easier for the user to narrow the range of choices.

Dynamic filtering for Catalyst CR works much the same way. “Our users are often searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack,” explained John Tredennick. “With dynamic filtering, we make it much simpler to isolate key documents and understand what they mean.”

“We work hard developing features to speed up our repository systems and to help reduce the cost of document reviews,” Tredennick added. “CR 6.1 takes a giant step in improving functionality for our clients and puts us further down the Litigation 2.0 road.”

Litigation 2.0: New Tools for the Internet Age

Litigating in the Internet age requires parties to confront two significant challenges. First, cases are no longer limited to a single geographic area: witnesses, experts, lawyers, defense groups, plaintiff groups, consultants and others involved in the case often reside in multiple locations. Each of these people have unique roles to play in the litigation process and connecting them effectively with each other, and with the relevant case files and documents, is essential to managing litigation effectively.

Second, the world continues to generate electronic data at explosive rates. A recent IDC survey reported that the world created 161 exabytes (161 trillion megabytes) of information in 2006. By way of analogy, if you could print 161 exabytes, you would end up with 12 stacks of paper extending from the earth to the sun. Or, you would have enough paper to wrap the Earth four times over.

All of this information is potentially discoverable. As a result, attorney review time now constitutes the biggest line item on many corporate legal budgets, with review costs estimated at $10 to $15 Billion annually. Catalyst’s mission is to help cut those costs by providing a central repository with integrated search and review workflow.

About Catalyst Repository Systems, Inc.

Catalyst provides secure repository systems to help corporations and their counsel deal with the explosion of digital content and work together on complex legal, business and financial matters. Its On Demand, hosted systems provide an alternative to traditional capital-intensive, in-house technology.

Catalyst’s products include: Catalyst CR, the first grid-enabled document repository for review, compliance, litigation support and due diligence; Catalyst XE, a powerful collaboration tool to connect professional teams and their files worldwide for cases, claims, deals and other complex legal matters, and Catalyst Review, customized document review workflow for corporate, insurance and other regulated environments.

Catalyst’s products have been used since 1998 by many of the largest organizations in the world (e.g., five of the world’s ten largest companies and over half of the nation’s 100 largest law firms). For further information about Catalyst, please visit www.catalystsecure.com.