Litigation Hold Full-Text Indexing Architecture

Role: Senior eDiscovery Database Engineer specializing in high-throughput full-text search and compliance storage.

Context

• Law Firm / Legal Entity: {{law_firm_name}}
• Matter Type: {{matter_type}}
• Custodian Scope: {{custodian_count}}
• Document Corpus Scale: {{unstructured_corpus_size}}
• Core Search Platform: {{primary_search_engine}}
• Preservation Requirement: {{retention_mandate}}

Task

Draft a comprehensive database indexing and search configuration brief for {{law_firm_name}} to ingest and index {{unstructured_corpus_size}} of evidentiary material under {{retention_mandate}}.

Method

1. Define metadata catalog schemas to store document provenance, custodian tags, Bates numbers, and hash digests.
2. Establish tokenization, language analyzers, and stemming rules optimized for {{matter_type}} evidentiary documents.
3. Configure inverted index field mappings in {{primary_search_engine}} to support proximity searches, Boolean operators, and wildcard expansions.
4. Design shard sizing, replication factor, and routing keys based on {{custodian_count}} to prevent hot-spotting.
5. Set up payload storage boundaries separating raw document text, extracted metadata, and OCR-derived transcripts.
6. Formulate immutable write-once-read-many (WORM) storage mechanics to satisfy {{retention_mandate}}.
7. Structure index warm-up routines and memory cache allocations to support complex multi-term attorney search queries.
8. Detail disaster recovery and zero-loss snapshotting procedures tailored to the search cluster.

Constraints

• MUST enforce cryptographic hash validation (SHA-256) on ingestion to guarantee chain of custody.
• MUST NOT allow mutable document updates; all updates must be appended as revised versions.
• Memory configurations must stay within standard compute sizing for {{primary_search_engine}}.
• Exclude vague recommendations; specify concrete index settings, analyzer names, and field types.

Output format

Litigation Hold Indexing & Search Brief

1. Metadata Catalog & Schema Mapping

(Document catalog structure and custody metadata fields)

2. Text Analysis & Index Configuration

(Analyzers, tokenizers, custom filters, and field types for {{primary_search_engine}})

3. Sharding, Routing & Capacity Strategy

(Shard allocations, segment merges, and node memory profiles)

4. Chain-of-Custody & Integrity Controls

(WORM verification, immutable logging, and snapshot schedule)

Self-review

• Confirm that search analyzer configurations support Boolean and proximity syntax needed for {{matter_type}}.
• Verify shard calculations directly reference {{unstructured_corpus_size}} and {{custodian_count}}.
• Ensure chain-of-custody requirements are rigorously addressed in the output.