eDJ Group

Translating eDiscovery to Teens = iPhone Forensics

01 - 08 - 2018

Greg Buckles

A teacher friend asked me to give a presentation on forensic science to her high school class. I agreed thinking I had so many eDiscovery 101 decks in my files that it would be easy to pull something fun together in an hour. My presentations for sales teams, venture capital investors, new lit support techs and such really did not seem to be that relevant to teens. It was easy enough to throw together slides defining forensic science, funny pics from my CSI days and the ‘CSI effect’ with the gratuitous Gil Grisham headshot. But even the basics of criminal/civil/investigation workflows seemed out of touch to their world. Then it hit me – iPhones! They all had iPhones and things on those phones that they did not want anyone to access.

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Mobile Device Discovery

Corporate Mobile Preservation Kit – Follow Up

01 - 02 - 2018

Greg Buckles

I received some good commentary and recommendations from your peers that I wanted to share with my own perspective. Credit for the good points goes to peers, any mistakes are obviously mine. Keep the feedback coming. • Examiner downtime – Several peers commented about the exorbitant cost associated with examiner downtime during scheduled collection days. It doesn’t help to have the leverage of 5 or 10 acquisition stations if custodians are late, or worse fail to show up to deliver devices. Apparently it was a chronic problem for laptop image collections that unexpectedly extended into MD images when the custodian had to sign off.

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Mobile Device Discovery

Corporate Mobile Device Preservation Kit

12 - 14 - 2017

Greg Buckles

For several years I have monitored the slow recognition and rise of mobile device content in civil discovery. I have run annual surveys, market reports and even put on mobile eDiscovery boot camps. Although it has taken longer than I expected back, I am now encountering substantial vendor charges to acquire, process and review text messages, chat conversations and other ‘business communications’ from Android and iOS phones during my annual ‘eDiscovery Cost/ROI Savings’ reports for long term clients. They are often surprised at how clever providers low ball the collection fees down to $250-400/device while burying exorbitant forensic tech time charges in the processing fees. My clients thought they understood the cost to agreeing to add phones to the accessible ESI source list, only to get sticker shock when I add up all the subsequent forensic time and data processing charges for an average $2,500+ per device total cost just to get it into Relativity. I encourage clients and peers to think through and demand estimates for the total cost associated with what I call 3rd generation ESI data sources before acquiescing to the typical overly broad discovery request. If you embrace the classic, “preserve broadly and review narrowly” model, you may consider investing in basic software and training to enable your corporate legal support or data security teams image unlocked mobile devices when the content is potentially relevant. So how much will that cost?

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Mobile Device Discovery

eDJ Update: O365 Compliance Center Holds-Productions

11 - 20 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Several months back I wrote a very careful piece detailing some potential errors or unexplained behavior seen with clients using Office 365’s Compliance Center (E3 license level) to apply holds and export search results. I was careful not to ring the ‘O365 is broken’ bell without full explanation and giving Microsoft the chance to debug the behavior. I have been a product manager and had to put out reputation fires sparked by well-meaning customers who fundamentally misunderstood the system or with unstable data/infrastructure. Luckily for me, we had redundant data repositories and although it would have been nice to shift to O365 for some things, it was not required. That meant we wanted to get to the bottom of the behavior, but it was not high client priority. The first line tech support did their best, but really could not understand why we cared about result sets that did not match up exactly. A friend in Redmond caught wind of things and got the tickets escalated. I would love to say that I was 100% sure that we understood the source of all the search behavior, but I do have a much better appreciation for the recent changes to the Office 365 search architecture and data sources. I covered some of the information dump in my recent RelativityFest 2017 blog and I wanted to circle back on the actual search/export issues.

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Office 365 Collection

Empower Client Decisions

11 - 13 - 2017

Greg Buckles

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EDD Services

eDJ Rant - How Not to Sell/Buy eDiscovery

11 - 07 - 2017

Greg Buckles

I took a long break from managing RFP’s for clients while eDJ tilted at the market analyst windmills. Those long five years of research prepared me to define client requirements, budget ROI support and to manage the subsequent Request for Proposal (RFP) process. Unfortunately, they also let me forget how few sales organizations/reps are mature enough to view an independent consultant as anything more than an impediment to converting the prospect to a closed deal. Too many modern reps are sales speed daters focused on creating an artificial relationship with the ‘decision makers’ that they can leverage into an emotion based sale. That perspective transforms my role from facilitator to duenna. They are so busy trying to bypass the imaginary gatekeeper that they miss the opportunity to educate and cultivate an advocate who deeply understands the client pain points, politics and goals. Below are some carefully anonymized sales tactics to be avoided by reps AND clients. Love to hear some of your pet peeves.

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Markets

eDJ Does RelativityFest 2017

11 - 06 - 2017

Greg Buckles

How to describe talking shop with CEO Andrew Sieja, Shawn Gaines and Jacque Flarherty after the team has spent days hosting two thousand peers and customers? Frenetic comes to mind. Our briefing topic hopped faster than a sexaholic swiping right on Tinder (see Andrew’s hysterical keynote malapropism below). I always enjoy these meetings and since I already caught you up after my ILTA briefing, we focused on what made Relativity Fest different from LTNY and the traditional trade shows.

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SaaS-Cloud Offerings

Decommissioning Servers Under Hold – Georgia Election Spoliation

10 - 26 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Several peers sent me links to the unfolding spoliation scandal regarding the Georgia election server that was wiped shortly after a suit was filed. There is not enough information yet to ascertain the context of the wipe, but the FBI took an image in March as part of their own election tampering investigation which hopefully preserved the critical evidence. As many have observed, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up.” Former BP engineer Kurt Mix discovered that the hard way with a 20 year sentence after destroying 17 text messages regarding the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill response. Maybe the technician’s at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University acted in good faith and were just decommissioning the server and back-ups. Maybe. Many of my clients have legacy hardware and applications that have never been properly decommissioned because they are under active legal hold(s). IT execs are racing to shut down their data and CoLo centers in their flight to the Cloud. So what do you do with a legacy server that was put under legal hold for perpetual serial litigation or criminal investigations where the authorities refuse to issue a formal release for decades?

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Legal Hold Notification

RelativityFest 2017 – See You In Chicago

10 - 19 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Just a fast reminder that I will be at RelativityFest Monday and Tuesday. This year I have decided to actually hit sessions and am only scheduling a formal briefing with the Relativity team. That gives me more time to socialize and talk shop with peers old and new. Email me at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com if you want to try to cross paths in the chaos. I always love to hear new perspectives and make new friends. Please take a second to do my short Relativity Consumption Poll. I am interested in getting a better idea of how real consumers are buying and using the Relativity platform. Sorry that life, storms and other crazy adventures have slowed my usual writing pace, but I am back at the keyboard and want to know how or if you use the market dominant technology. Next poll with focus on O365.

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Law Firm eDiscovery Platform

Microsoft O365 Faces Hard Questions at EDI

10 - 16 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Back in July I cautiously reported some potential issues encountered while running normal acceptance/validation testing on client’s Security and Compliance Center. I am sad to report that despite opening several MS support tickets, we are no closer to understanding why large PST exports will unexpectedly crash without reporting an error or why items on hold seem to be disappearing from search results. In the intervening months, I have been deluged with similar stories from Microsoft partner products, fellow forensic consultants and sharp corporate litigation support techs who follow my ‘trust but verify’ maxim. I did not make the EDI Summit last week, but I did get some interesting reports from clients and peers about the O365 sessions.

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SaaS-Cloud Offerings

Viral Photos – A Personal Reminder of How ESI Spreads

09 - 18 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Excuse me for hijacking my professional musings to share some personal moments that went viral. It is at least a good reminder of how a picture, email, text or other ESI can propagate beyond our illusions of privacy and controls. All it takes is a camera phone or a well-placed Reuter’s photographer to be surprised by your own pictures in your feeds. Rather than retell the story of our tiny efforts in the larger Harvey response, here is the local write up. And here are some of places our pictures showed up:

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Don’t Let Self-Preservation Inhibit Growth

09 - 18 - 2017

Greg Buckles

I am proud of how Texas and Louisiana civilians jumped into the floodwaters to help neighbors, strangers and first responders. This contrasted sharply to how institutionalized disaster relief seems to take longer and longer to deliver effective support where and when it is desperately needed. That is not a criticism of those who have so freely shared their possessions, time and money through charities and other NGOs. Instead, it is a broader professional observation about the potential loss of focus and effectiveness that accompanies the transition of a group effort into an organizational entity. To quote Samuel Butler, “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” Over time, organizations tend to become more concerned with justifying their growth, budget, authority or other self-interests over the actual goals they were created to serve. So how does this apply to our world of eDiscovery?

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eDiscovery During a Disaster

09 - 04 - 2017

Greg Buckles

I am one of the lucky Houstonians whose home survived Harvey relativity intact. We were fortunate to be able to shelter friends, help rescue those stranded and contribute to the recovery effort even as the run-off water put other areas under water. It has been hard to get my head back into work, but I wanted to call attention to my friend Craig Ball’s blog on post flooding data recovery and share a couple thoughts on disaster planning for eDiscovery. We make the “in case you get hit by a bus” joke about that one paralegal or lit support tech who knows where everything eDiscovery lives. But what happens when a bus named Harvey, Katrina or Sandy takes out the team and all regional support services? When a natural disaster costs upwards of $190 billion, you can bet that there will be reasonable disagreements over decisions made before, during and after that disaster. And our society generally resolves such disputes in the courts. A good example of reasonably anticipated litigation is the flooding around the San Jacinto river that some think resulted from the decision not to pre-release water from the upstream Lake Conroe dam. But what happens when your legal staff are either refugees or volunteers helping clean up their community?

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Legal Hold Notification

ILTA 2017 eDJ Outtakes

08 - 21 - 2017

Greg Buckles

ILTACON 2017 has wrapped up and I managed a lightning pass of briefings, meetings and socializing in Vegas. Overall, I am impressed at how ILTA has grown up and may even have stolen the crown from LNTY for best consumer legal technology event. I broke down the sponsorship number comparison in a recent blog. It will come as no surprise that ILTA’s 5 day event in a Vegas casino complex feels a lot less crowded than the 3 days of LTNY in a Manhattan hotel. Neither event really publishes attendance numbers (LTNY site claims 10k+). ILTA seems to attract the consumer/practitioner while LTNY has evolved into more of a provider/sales event. The ILTA exhibit hall had steady foot traffic and actual buyers on my forays. As one sponsor noted, tech partners and support services dominated the floor more than giant Relativity channel partners trying to snap up the dwindling supply of big cases without a dedicated review team. In visual terms, blue dominated the exhibit floor instead of kCura orange. Several attendees remarked that the show was well organized with lots of opportunities to talk with other practioners instead of just being talked at by provider panels (yep, those same panels I was moderating until recently). Most of my meetings were client RFP driven, but here are some non-confidential briefing/meeting outtakes and photos:

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SaaS-Cloud Offerings
EDD Services

Trust But Verify, Especially with Cloud Sources & Tools

08 - 14 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Whether we are talking about custodial preservation, journal archiving or any collection/export technology, my moto has always been, ‘trust but verify’. We all learn from our earliest mistakes. Mine was trusting some Microsoft consultant’s that helped me build an email search tool to respond to the first Enron related subpoenas. That drove home the lesson that every environment, data stream and software version need validation testing and ongoing QC checks. Believe me, I hate finding bugs or non-compliance at my clients. I know that I will end up having to write the plain language explanation of any potential data loss or incomplete productions. Enterprise IT departments generally have a lab environment and perform documented acceptance/compatibility tests prior to moving a new application/version to the production environment. Too many legal and compliance professionals have relied on their providers without performing similar validation tests with known data sets and consistently checking different phases of processing, review rules, redaction settings and productions. Now that enterprises are migrating live data under legal hold to Office 365 or other cloud platforms, testing is critical to demonstrate your reasonable faith in these ‘inaccessible’ systems. By that misappropriated term of art, I mean that you no longer have direct access to the storage and databases. So what are some of my basic validation test?

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SaaS-Cloud Offerings
Archiving

Guidance & inData Acquired

08 - 07 - 2017

Greg Buckles

The consolidation of the eDiscovery niche market continues and venture capital money seems to be gushing. If you back track some of recent acquisitions (Discovia by Lighthouse eDiscovery and inData by Ipro), you will notice that they both took VC money shortly before the announcements. OpenText has a long history of acquiring software with a strongly established customer base. In this case OpenText put down $240M for Guidance. That is a roughly 2X multiple of Guidance’s $115M expected revenue (operating at a net loss). That is well below the target 4-6X revenue multiple that most technology firms seek, but Guidance Software is not your typical startup.

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Collection Platform

No, Microsoft Is Not Limiting Office 365 Legal Searches/Holds

07 - 31 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Seconds into a provider briefing, I got hit with, “Did you see that Microsoft is ending legal holds?” based on a blog by Tony Redmond in Petri IT Knowledgebase. I work hard to keep up with my feeds and search engines, but this one slipped by me. A bit of digging made it clear that Microsoft is just deprovisioning the legal search and hold capability in the Exchange Administrative Center (EAC) and the SharePoint Admin Center to push Office 365 tenants to the new Security and Compliance Center portal. Your existing holds and incremental searches will continue to be effective, but you will not be able to create new searches in these portals. The disappointing news is that as of this date Microsoft does not seem to be providing a migration mechanism for early adopter corporate legal departments with extensive holds or active compliance searches. Migrations are always tricky and I am betting that I will have to QC and sign off on some in the next year.

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Office 365 Collection
Legal Hold Notification

Has Iltacon Eclipsed LegalTech?

07 - 19 - 2017

Greg Buckles

LegalTech New York came first. It dominated the software/marketing development cycle. The vast majority of major version releases were timed for maximum impact at the show. My clients scheduled their budgets and RFP projects around LegalTech. My eDJ Matrix was created to categorize and track providers at LTNY to support my insane briefing and demo schedule in those early years. But has ILTACON become more relevant to consumers and providers? I have been tracking LTNY exhibitor and sponsor numbers since 2008. Although I have been a regular speaker at ILTA and ARMA, I neglected to track their exhibitor/sponsor numbers as they gained momentum. My return to solo consulting gigs has pretty much taken me off the speaker circuit. My first briefing requests for ILTACON 2017 rolled in and peaked my curiosity as to how sponsorship compared to LTNY. Wow.

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Markets

Who Pays for eDiscovery Tech Training?

07 - 17 - 2017

Greg Buckles

Life as a consultant means following client trends and hot topics. This year has pushed me to get more hands on with client provider and invoice management systems as some of my favorite clients work their way down the eDiscovery lifecycle. Provider billing practices and the lack of supervision by retained counsel never cease to astound me. Clients negotiate hard for competitive processing and hosting rates only to discover that their PM and miscellaneous tech charges had gone through the roof. They saved money on the data, but lost the budget as both provider and firm burned hours planning, managing and training the review. I am the last person to discount the value of a sharp PM and lead paralegal guiding contract reviewers through complex relevance and issue coding. But is it ethical for providers and counsel to bill for their personnel to learn the technology before using it? Too many times I have dug into large bills only to determine that personnel had been put in the position to ‘learn on the job’. Even before the bills, I get red flags when key players start to push back on proposed tech for more ‘traditional’ systems. Our industry makes it hard for professionals to admit that they don’t know every new system. No one wants to tell the attorneys ‘no’ or I don’t know. If you are an expert in one collection or review platform, you can probably figure out how to run the competitive packages. While this is true, is it ethical to bill your client for the time you wasted digging through manuals and watching downloaded training videos?

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Matter Management
Review Platform

DTI v. LDiscovery – Round One to LDiscovery

07 - 10 - 2017

Greg Buckles

For industry insiders who have been following the fight over four top Epiq sales reps recruited by LDiscovery, the various matters were consolidated to the southern US district court of New York, which issued a motion denying DTI’s motion for injunctive relief. To ‘mansplain’ from my own non-attorney perspective, Judge Rakoff’s 30 page opinion seems to drop the hammer on the legal basis of many of DTI’s claims, while confirming the basic sequence of events. All of us in eDiscovery should know that things are rarely black and white when large amounts of money are at stake. Here are a couple of my favorite take aways (remember, these are perspective from a non-attorney):

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Markets