H5 is a privately held company specializing in information retrieval systems for the legal industry, with offices in San Francisco and New York City. Founded in 1999, H5 combines advanced proprietary information retrieval technologies with professional expertise in linguistics, statistics, computer science, law, information technology, process engineering and e-discovery. The company completed its third and latest round of venture capital funding in 2005; its primary investors are the private equity firms of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Walden VC.
Contents
H5 has attracted positive attention for its promotion of common standards in the field of information retrieval, including its participation in the U.S. Government’s TREC Legal Track initiative, a research program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that measures the accuracy of document review and search methods for e-discovery. H5 was profiled in an October 2007 Forbes article noting the company’s prominent Advisory Board members and its 2007 Thought Leadership Summit that the company co-hosted with Georgetown Law. At that summit, United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer joined a panel discussion alongside H5 CEO Nicolas Economou and moderator Arthur R. Miller of Harvard Law School.
Processes
H5’s proprietary automated document review process is a hybrid approach that relies on both human subject matter expertise and advanced information retrieval technologies. The company utilizes academically validated quality assurance methods, based on the government’s TREC Legal Track protocols, to measure the accuracy of its results.
H5’s process and results have been evaluated by a variety of independent industry and government studies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 2008 TREC Legal Track study, as well as a 2005 independent academic study which compared H5’s process against a team of attorneys using traditional manual document review methodologies on a 48,000 document collection. (The manual review process found 51% of all relevant documents vs. H5’s retrieval rate of 95%.)
H5's name
H5’s name derives from what it considers to be the historical analogy between 18th century inventor John Harrison’s fourth marine chronometer (known as “H4”), which provided an accurate measurement of navigational longitude (thereby unlocking the world’s ocean for accurate navigation) and its own modern process by which to precisely navigate through vast amounts of electronic data.
Client engagements
Although H5 does not disclose its clients on its website, the company has been publicly reported to work on cases involving RealNetworks, Microsoft, and Tyco, as well as with prominent law firms such as O’Melveny & Myers, Boies Schiller & Flexner, and Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott.