Attorney Smith is working on a new case involving a motorcycle accident. The plaintiff is claiming that his local garage failed to spot the leaking brake fluid from his BMW 1150 motorcycle when he was at the garage for maintenance, which caused a mechanical failure leading to the accident. Attorney Smith, who is representing the defendant garage, has a database containing thousands of documents, including email to and from the plaintiff and the defendant, email from a mailing list for motorcycle aficionados that both plaintiff and defendant participated in, and OCR'd documents including maintenance records and receipts from the garage.

Attorney Smith wishes to find the responsive documents as quickly as possible, without having to read each of the thousands of documents in the database and he has asked you conduct a search of the documents to find responsive and privileged documents.

Please click here to review sample key search parameters to assist you in creating and formatting your search terms for this assignment.

1. What key words would you search to find the responsive documents?

2. What issues can occur in key word search results when searching OCR'd documents?

3. Your initial key word search produced a large result set and you notice the results contain maintenance records for automobiles as well as motorcycles, and in a couple cases contained email about music, not maintenance, records. Describe the functions of each of the following search methods and how would you change your search terms to perform additional searches to narrow down your results:

a. Boolean search

b. Subset search

c. Fuzzy search

d. Concept search