Publish a paper on ligation support analytics

Question

I am lead developer on the server side of some litigation support software. I want to publish a paper as an individual. I have talked to my company and they will review the paper and they have the option of me listing the company or not - there is no conflict with the company. Some of the analyitics have not (yet) been implemented by the company. The nature of the paper is an academic or theoretical nature. For example:

• The science of information retrieval and how is that applied to discovery
• The science of machine learning and how it is applied to discovery
• Cosine similarity applied to discovery
• How is machine learning used to categorize
• How is machine learning used to classify
• Special case of binomial classification (e.g. responsive versus non-responsive)

What are some publications or web sites I could submit this type of paper to?

I want to get it out there so it can be hit by search engines. Let people post questions and comments. Refine the paper and hopefully submit it for presentation at a conference in the future.

I am a developer - I could just build a web site myself for this and but it would take a while to get picked up by search engines and I would get a low ranking based on traffic and number of links. Also since it is tech based those are not terms an attorney would know to search on.

Post on like a data science site is of no value. For data science people this is just basic stuff.

Answer 1

Most local bar associations have a publication that they distribute to their members. These are often in print and online. You could try one of them, or all of them.

There is the EDDE Journal. This one is strange because it gets some serious people writing for it but distribution sucks. I cannot even find a home page for the journal, so here is a link to one edition.

The third place would be any of the legal blogs or "tech lawyer" blogs - you could ask to guest post something. I am thinking of technolawyer, lawyerist, etc.

The problem is that you are getting into a crowded field with a lot of established voices. Grossman and Cormack, Ralph Losey, William Webber, to name a few. Plus every ediscovery vendor publishing their own blog. Oh, and quite a few journals do not accept submissions from service providers! The other problem you have hit on, which is that the terms you use to describe the solution are not the terms that attorneys use to search for the solution you provide and that the terms attorneys use are very general and generate a whole bunch of SEO-rich hits.

I am pessimistic about creating content which will spur discussion. I do not want to discourage you, because I think the space can use a fresh perspective (and you might be it), but online discussion either does not exist or it gets reduced to petty squabbles. Take a look at the predictive coding Linkedin group, which held some promise but is now nothing more than a repository for people to post links to stuff. (I would suggest that Losey, Craig Ball, and the Bowtie Lawyer guy are the bloggers who get attention; take a look at their posts for an idea of the types of discssion being had.) However, about that fresh perspective, all of these bloggers say the same thing in the same way so there is opportunity here.

I am stopping the answer here because I have already left the scope of the question. If I was to continue I would offer my opinion about the best way to develop a voice in this market, but it's probably the same as any market.

Answer 2

I think jqning's answer provides good information. I would add only the following two points:

(1) It seems like you could use some focus on who your audience is. Lawyers, whom you specifically identify, are not going to be interested in analytics, even techy ones.

(2) You might consider partnering with, or at least talking with, EDRM, which is an organization specifically focused on the types of issues you're assessing. If they themselves are not interested, they'll know the journals.