Topic Creation

This assignment applies only to teams that are performing the Structured Evaluation Exercise as their term project.

The minimum size for a Structured Evaluation Exercise is two people; teams of three will permit more ambitious query development and result analysis to be performed, teams larger than four people are not permitted (if more than three people elect this option, more than one team must be formed -- each team will accomplish the same tasks; information should not be exchanged between teams outside of class discussions).

All materials from this exercise may be posted to the TREC Legal Track Web site unless we receive a specific request that that not be done (because they may be useful to track participants who are preparing to work with the Enron collection for the first time).

This assignment requires that you create a "complaint" and three associated production requests for civil discovery in the Enron email collection. Create these materials in the format of the TREC Legal Track, for which examples can be found on the Legal Track Web Page, but to keep the effort involved reasonable limit your complaint to a couple of paragraphs in which you provide:

a hypothetical lawsuit title (John Smith v. Big Bad Energy Corp.)
your legal theory of the case,
what cause(s) of action you wish to bring (stock fraud, wrongful death, etc.),
what relief you are seeking (damages, an injunction, etc.).

Your complaint may address any (reasonable) topic; it may be, but need not be, related to Enron's business of energy trading (if you choose a topic related to energy trading, the reading for the first week might be useful). The instructors are available to you as consultants during this process.

Each team should designate ONE person as the requesting party: that person will create the "complaint" and the production request, they will negotiate the Boolean queries with the Topic Authority (a second member of their team), and they will ultimately perform the relevance assessments. They will be available for occasional "meet and confer" meetings, but (until the final report preparation) will NOT closely collaborate with the remainder of their team. The requesting party should not have previous contact with the Enron email (beyond what they learned in our reading for the first week).

For each production request, the requesting party and the Topic Authority (the representative of the responding party, and the only person authorized to contact the requesting party) will negotiate a Final Boolean Query by telephone. Jason Baron will participate in this call, and will help to guide the process. The Topic Authority is allowed to be familiar with the collection, and in general would benefit form being so. The Topic Authority should contact Tamer Elsayed to request that the search system be installed on their laptop. They may use this system during the telephone conference, but they should be careful not to release information to the requesting party that they would not normally be entitled to during that negotiation.

This assignment is due by email to both instructors by 6 PM on Monday March 23. Include the Final Boolean Query with each production request in the TREC format.