With many S&P 500 companies now getting over half of their revenues from foreign sales, foreign language documents are quickly becoming a routine part of the legal practice. Whether for cross-border litigation, multi-national investigations, antitrust reviews or simple due diligence, legal professionals increasingly need to search, organize and review documents in a multitude of languages.
Many of the litigation support systems and other legal document review platforms in use today were designed primarily to support the English language. These systems were built in the 1990s or even later and rely upon technology that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to support many foreign languages. With multiple language documents becoming increasingly common, corporations and their counsel require legal support tools that are built for the global economy.
This whitepaper provides guidance on the issues relating to reviewing foreign language documents. It starts by addressing the limitations of the ASCII code used by most current systems and shows how Unicode, the new global standard, provides a solution. It then looks at foreign language search, particularly the thorny issues relating to searching Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai (CJK languages), which use symbols instead of letters and often do not use punctuation or spaces to show word boundaries. Next, the paper examines the additional challenges presented by searching multilanguage document sets. Finally, it addresses some of the current best practices for creating efficient review assignments in multi-language matters.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|