Discovery-led refinement in e-discovery investigations: sensemaking, cognitive ergonomics and system design

Given the very large numbers of documents involved in e-discovery investigations, lawyers face a considerable challenge of
collaborative sensemaking. We report findings from three workplace studies which looked at different aspects of how this challenge
was met. From a sociotechnical perspective, the studies aimed to understand how investigators collectively and individually
worked with information to support sensemaking and decision making. Here, we focus on discovery-led refinement; specifically,
how engaging with the materials of the investigations led to discoveries that supported refinement of the problems and new
strategies for addressing them. These refinements were essential for tractability. We begin with observations which show how
new lines of enquiry were recursively embedded. We then analyse the conceptual structure of a line of enquiry and consider
how reflecting this in e-discovery support systems might support scalability and group collaboration. We then focus on the
individual activity of manual document review where refinement corresponded with the inductive identification of classes of
irrelevant and relevant documents within a collection. Our observations point to the effects of priming on dealing with these
efficiently and to issues of cognitive ergonomics at the human–computer interface. We use these observations to introduce
visualisations that might enable reviewers to deal with such refinements more efficiently.