ESI Ninja eDiscovery KB

The ESI Ninja KB is a Web-based tool and knowledgebase ("KB") designed to organize, store and retrieve all types of research.

For demonstration purposes, I've taken the more comprehensive ESI Ninja KB I use for professional engagements and redesigned it for public access by creating two topic-specific KBs: the eDiscovery KB and the ePrivacy KB.

With the full version of the demo, a user can carry out three basic types of operations: (1) classify; (2) annotate; and (3) search (discussed briefly below). In the public version available here, you can search by keyword, access stored research and filter that research in various ways, but you won't be able to add, delete or edit records.
For the time being, I've concentrated on functionality rather than breadth/depth of content. As a result, these demos currently contain a small subset of the materials I've assembled over the years (key cases, briefs, protective orders, articles, local rules, white papers and other resources) and certain attributes are only partially fleshed out. In terms of development priorities, over the near term I plan (subject to the feedback I receive) to leave the content of the eDiscovery KB essentially as is (perhaps adding a few notable cases etc. from time to time) and to focus my efforts on developing the ePrivacy KB — adding new features, functionality and content.
One final introductory note: Some features of the ESI Ninja KB require that you have Javascript enabled in your browser.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions, would like to give the ESI Ninja KB a more thorough test drive, or request that the demo (or the ESI Ninja blog) address a particular topic or issue, please let me know.

Each research record can be classified as either a "Case" or an "Article":

Cases — Materials associated with formal legal proceedings, e.g., court decisions, legal briefs, ESI stipulations, protective orders and other documents filed by and/or exchanged among the parties.
Articles — All other research materials related to eDiscovery and ESI, e.g., news articles, blog posts, white papers, local rules, scanned notes and the like.

This classification takes place when a user initially decides to enter the research record into the Case or Article database.

Each of these records can also be categorized and described in greater detail — both to capture information the user deems valuable and to facilitate subsequent search — through the annotation process (described in the next section).

Each research record can be annotated in a number of ways to capture important information about the research, which can also be used to help find that research (and similar research records) when the need arises:

Assign it to one or more user-created projects — e.g., eDiscovery, Information Retrieval, Privacy, Smith v. Jones.
Capture its basic attributes — e.g.,
- for Cases: Case Name, Jurisdiction, Date, Judge, Document Type, Claims, ESI.
- for Articles: Title, Publication, Date, Author.
Add whatever notes or descriptions you think would be helpful — e.g., your analysis of the source, links to related materials, excerpts from the source itself.
Tag it with one or more user-created issue tags — e.g., Accessibility, Authentication, Backup tapes, Blocking statutes, Defensible search, Metadata, Preservation, Privacy, Privilege - FRE 502, Proportionality, Sampling, Sanctions.

Using simple SQL-based search queries, users can search through all the research records they and their colleagues have previously found and stored in the KB:

By keyword — e.g., every case and article containing the term "predictive" or every case with "Rambus" in the case name.
By project — e.g., all research in the "eDiscovery" or "Smith v. Jones" project.
By attribute — e.g., every case from Judge Scheindlin, every S.D.N.Y. decision or every New York Law Journal article.
By issue tag — e.g., all cases and articles tagged "Privilege - FRE 502".