Many attorneys are under the impression that keyword searches are the core of discovery. Their assumption is that the natural (and perhaps only) method for locating documents is to run a simple language search through a large set of potentially relevant documents. This search would be followed by a considerable number of document review attorneys narrowing down the relevant documents by reading through them, one by one.

There is, however, an alternative that provides results with far greater accuracy and efficiency. Advanced analytics is a process in which computers identify patterns and behaviors within a collection of documents. It allows for documents to be searched at extremely high speeds for patterns that would not be recognizable to the human eye. Its capabilities are especially useful to the financial sector, where enormous amounts of data must be stored, analyzed, and subjected to stringent compliance requirements.