eDJ Group

05 - 26 - 2014

Conrad Jacoby

On May 14, I had the privilege of serving as Program Chair and as lead instructor for the District of Columbia Bar’s annual “Essential Checklist for E-Discovery” CLE program. This day-long introductory program, which has been an annual event at the Bar for over ten years, has helped introduce and train hundreds of lawyers and legal paraprofessionals about some of the basic tasks of e-discovery practice, such as deciphering “IT speak” and developing meaningful e-discovery request and responses.

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eDJ Brief: CAAT-Content Analyst Analytical Technology

05 - 19 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Content Analyst is one of a very small number of companies supply the OEM analytics embedded in the majority of early case assessment, review and processing platforms. Content Analyst has expanded on its original Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) system with many additional text analytics algorithms. The full suite now spans conceptual search, dynamic clustering, auto-categorization, email threading, text near-duplicate identification, language identification and automatic summarization. As a consumer, you have only seen the CAAT functionality exposed through their partners’ interfaces. Most CAAT partners such as kCura Relativity, iPro Eclipse, iConect Xera and Mindseye TunnelVision only leverage selected analytics capabilities. Founded in 2004, Content Analyst has 13 patents and is one of the earliest analytic engines designed for integration into discovery products.

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Technology Assisted Review

eDJ Brief: Xera

05 - 12 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Launched in 2012, Xera is a web-based review platform available as a direct purchase or through their hosting partners. iConect continues to invest in user accessibility, mature workflow and new partner integrations for their HTML5 web interface. What does all that mean? The iConect team is betting that the market wants a dedicated review point product accessible by any level of user from any device. This bucks the ‘Platform’ trend that has had providers bolting processing, collections and legal hold code onto their review programs. Clearwell started this ‘feature sprawl’ race to the mythical Unified eDiscovery Platform more than five years back, but the market still seems to gravitate to ‘built for purpose’ tools that have feature depth as well as coverage breadth. Thus new functionality added to Xera such as the free iView metrics visualization module, customizable dashboard tiles, seven new localized languages (including Russian, Japanese and German) and classification by drag/drop.

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Technology Assisted Review
Review Platform

Who Consumes Analytics Anyway?

05 - 05 - 2014

Greg Buckles

While working on how to define the analytics market space, I quickly realized that the consumers of analytics comprised many different market segments with unique pain points, feature requirements and even consumption models. Marketing and sales directors abhor a complex market space because of the challenges it presents to create a simple, clean brand and value proposition for their offerings. Thus the annual cycle of eDiscovery buzzwords splashed across LTNY booth banners and LTN ads. However, oversimplification and high pressure sales of the latest PC/TAR/IG/LSI/NLP variation can easily lead to buyer’s remorse. Thus the client requests to break down the analytics market(s) and players into something easier to understand. Take the eDJ analytic adoption survey to give me some real metrics to share. That brings us back to who is actually buying and using these new technologies. I am breaking the buyers into three initial segments: Corporate, Firm and Provider.

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Technology Assisted Review

Analytics – How Are You Using Them?

04 - 28 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Predictive Coding (PC), Technology Assisted Review (TAR), Auto Categorization, Social Networking, Chronological Analysis and now even Topic Modeling are all based on data engines that identify and extract patterns, exceptions and visualizations from large collections of relatively similar data sources. The market has long lumped all of these usage cases under the Analytics label, starting back with the earliest enhanced review offerings from Attenex and Stratify back in 2001 and 2006 respectively. Jason R. Baron and Bennett B. Borden wrote a nice law review article that lays out a good perspective on how analytics have crept into legal practice. That has clients asking eDJ to filter out the marketing buzz and tell them how other law firms and corporations are REALLY using these new toys. Thus we have created a new survey to get some solid metrics to share with our consulting clients and all of you Participating Members who have taken a survey. The goal of this research cycle is to understand how analytics are used, consumed, delivered and their benefits. Beyond the survey, I will be conducting focus interviews over the next month to get your perspective from the trenches. So please shoot me an email if you would be willing to share your experiences, successes and challenges with cutting edge analytics.

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Technology Assisted Review

Upstream eDiscovery = Info Governance

04 - 21 - 2014

Greg Buckles

The corporate perspective on eDiscovery has slowly matured from ad hoc reaction into the desire to proactively manage discovery costs through proactive business processes. This evolution to a mature Information Governance lifecycle has been at the heart of my consulting practice. It makes me happy to see BigLaw firms recognize the market opportunity and launch practice areas focusing on the upstream data lifecycle. We need more counsel who have a firm foundation in eDiscovery and who are comfortable with technology to guide clients. eDJ consultants are not practicing attorneys and we frequently work with client’s retained counsel on data maps, preservation systems, migrations and other enterprise initiatives. It is rare to find a litigator who ‘gets’ enterprise infrastructure and the complexities of Big Data systems. They are out there and it looks like law firms are starting to recognize their expertise by launching new practice areas focused on information governance, compliance and eDiscovery for the enterprise. Several calls, press releases and a quick Google helped confirm this trend.

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Archiving
Corporate Matter Management
EDD Services
Markets

Ongoing eDJ Polls – Snap Insight

04 - 14 - 2014

Greg Buckles

While reviewing the results of ongoing eDJ polls, I spotted a couple interesting items that I wanted to share and discuss. First of all, thank you for taking our short polls for premium access. The new system is working great and the number of Participating members is going up every week. Validated non-provider members can take a 5 question poll to get immediate access to research reports, survey results, eDJ Notes and more. We are about ready to close down the Cloud Adoption poll and should have a new Analytic Adoption poll up in the next week or so. Here are insights from our 3 active polls:

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Office 365 Collection
Cloud ESI Collection
Mobile Device Discovery

E-Discovery Misadventures #1 – “What were we looking for, again?”

04 - 09 - 2014

Conrad Jacoby

Anyone who’s spent much time working in the e-discovery community has horror stories about projects that went horribly wrong and catastrophes that were narrowly avoided—or sometimes not avoided at all. Sometimes, you can blame technology. More often, though, the problems come from the human side of things. We lawyers can be inconsistent. We can be forgetful. And sometimes, we focus on what we think is the right answer before we actually perform the analysis that supports that conclusion.

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eDJ Take on Proposed FRCP Rule 37(e) – Loss of ESI Under Preservation

04 - 07 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Ever since the 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to address Electronically Stored Information as potential evidence, practitioners have struggled to interpret them. The public comment period closed February 18, 2014 and latest round of changes to the potential rules have been published in the Agenda Book for the Advisory Committee meeting to be held on April 10-11, 2014 in Portland, OR. Now these proposed rules cover a lot of ground, so I am hammering on the FRCP 37(e) changes to understand their potential impact from my corporate client perspective. Overall, I feel that the proposed changes do a good job of clarifying the court’s job and their curative measures available for ESI loss. However, I am not sure that these rules will actually accomplish that stated goals of reducing the over-preservation burden on litigants. Reducing the fear of ‘sanctions’ does little to clear the ‘fog of war’ that envelopes most companies trying to scope and enact reasonable litigation holds. I hoped that the proposed rules would address the potential reliance on new analytic technologies to develop selective preservation criteria, but the committee kept the guidance on principles rather than concrete prescriptives.

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Legal Hold Notification

Migrating ESI on Legal Hold

04 - 02 - 2014

Greg Buckles

In the age of Cloud services and agile technologies leapfrogging each other, Electronically Stored Information (ESI) has become increasingly mobile. But what does the Legal department do when IT wants to migrate ESI on hold to the latest and greatest platform? The economic, accessibility and management advantages to Cloud systems such as Office 365 and Google docs have almost every CIO considering or piloting them. Legal should participate in the solution, rather than resisting this wave of change. There are many different strategies for meeting the company’s preservation obligations while migrating or transforming email, files and other ESI on hold.

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Office 365 Collection

Legal Hold Notification
ESI Sources

All Cloud, All The Time

04 - 01 - 2014

michael simon

One encouraging trend that we saw at LegalTech (and at a few meetings before and after) are new systems that bring incredible speed and responsiveness to the eDiscovery processing and review platform market. We’re not talking about small increases, either—we’ve oohed and ahhhed over massive speed increases for searching, filtering, and even loading data. The bigger news is that these new systems offer hot-rod performance at prices in the double-digit per GB loaded range. That price is often assessed monthly, so that it combines processing with hosting, but that’s still usually below the range of what some established providers are charging for hosting alone.

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Cloud ESI Collection
EDD Services

Turning on a Dime - eDJ Group is Here to Stay

03 - 27 - 2014

Greg Buckles

We have made no secret of fact that the eDJ Group has stepped out of the analyst arena and refocused our much leaner team on strategic corporate consulting. We bid a fond farewell to Barry Murphy in his new role with X1. Although we have worked hard to keep our clients, readers and professional network up to date with the changes, but the ‘Telephone Game’ can mangle even the clearest message when it is passed second hand. Twice this week I received job inquiries because, “We heard that eDJ was shutting down.” I appreciate the inquiries, but eDJ Group is here to stay, albeit playing a different role in the market place. I wanted to take a moment to spell out the new eDJ Group in simple terms.

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Markets

Office 365 – The Good, The Bad and the Unusual

03 - 20 - 2014

Greg Buckles

The Houston Association of Litigation Support Managers (HALSM) invited me to speak yesterday on a topic of my choice. Discovery on Office 365 has dominated recent inquiries and engagements for the eDJ team, so I decided to condense my blogs, research, testing and accumulated Office 365 information into an hour presentation. We almost made that 60 minute mark by moving at full speed, but I was happy to detour for all the great questions. Every week brings a new twist as corporations are enticed to migrate their users and ESI to the Cloud based on the potential savings in cost, overhead and infrastructure. The topic definitely resonated with the HALSM membership based on the high attendance, good questions and willingness to run a bit over the normal lunch hour. This material will eventually end up in one or more research reports, but I thought that I would share a couple of the better discussion points.

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Office 365 Collection

Social Media Collection
Cloud ESI Collection
SharePoint Collection
Corporate eDiscovery Platform

Technology and Hubris

03 - 17 - 2014

Conrad Jacoby

One of the driving factors in e-discovery behind the spectacular growth in linguistic analytical tools like concept search, document clustering, and PC/TAR is the simple fact that people don’t all speak alike. I sometimes buy a grinder for lunch, while my business partner prefers subs, and a Philadelphia-based client of mine prefers hoagies. We’re all talking about the same kind of sandwich, of course (though there’s some debate over the need for lettuce), but a computer algorithm using key word search won’t necessarily make that connection unless a helpful human being has manually tied these different terms together for it. A good concept or context search engine, however, will recognize that these terms are often discussed in similar circumstances (e.g., lunch, types of cheese); it will serve up these sandwich terms together, not separately.

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Technology Assisted Review
Review Platform

Calling for Your BEST/WORST Stupid eDiscovery War Stories!

03 - 14 - 2014

Greg Buckles

Attendance at the Houston bDiscovery gathering fluctuates wildly based on weather, spring break and many other factors. This evenings gathering was small, but rich in experience with a wild variety of clients, partners and employers. As happens so often at LTNY or anywhere eDiscovery professionals and alcohol mix, the conversation quickly devolves into carefully sanitized stories of bonehead mistakes, amazing bills, print parties, Luddite partners, cookie bearing copy reps and more. eDiscovery old-timers know better than to name names or give any specific details that could even hint at the identities of the parties, but these stories are more than entertainment. They comprise our tribal wisdom. They can educate the next generation of eDiscovery professionals so that they are not doomed to repeat the same mistakes we made in the 1990’s and too many of our clients continue to make today. Somewhere around the third round of stories/drinks (take your pick), my long time friend Joni Miller at DiscoverReady remarked, “Oh, the stories we could tell…” That inspired me to solicit your stories with a pledge to render them anonymous and compile them into fictional comedic tales for our mutual edutrainment (yes, I made that word up. In fact I did it during a dot-com pitch session once upon a time). Below find a story that I will neither attribute nor claim other than the obfuscation and deliberate exaggeration for effect. ***The following completely fictional. EVERYTHING has been changed to protect the guilty***

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EDD Services
Processing-ECA

LegalTech 2014 - Details Matter

03 - 12 - 2014

Conrad Jacoby

A month after the end of the 2014 LegalTech NY conference, I’m still trying to find an overarching theme for my experience. For all the valuable meetings that Mike and I had, I still felt somewhat disconnected from the show. I don’t know how to better describe the sensation—I was there (and I have a couple of light up vendor pens to show for it!), but I don’t have the same number of LegalTech vignettes and memories that I’ve had in the past.

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Markets

LegalTech 2014 - A Slow, Subtle Change in Focus?

03 - 07 - 2014

michael simon

In my last post for eDJ about a somewhat disappointing show at the 2014 LegalTech, I admit I set up some “straw man” arguments that I could easily knock down. Was the lousy weather to blame? Perhaps . . . but not really. Was the fact that everybody seemed to be focusing on off-site meetings to blame? Again, perhaps—but but there’s a bigger story behind this change in behavior What’s missing from LegalTech lately are the customers. There are plenty of solution providers, consultants, and the like. We’re there in greater force every year it seems, even as our complaints about having to make the pilgrimage to New York City in the dead of winter grow ever louder. Everybody in our industry – at least everybody with something to sell – was there. But who were they selling to?

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Markets

When Your Key Corporate Custodian Walks

03 - 03 - 2014

Greg Buckles

One of my favorite client’s just put in her notice and that got me thinking about managing legal holds with our increasingly mobile workforce. We all know those key custodians who are the “go to” person when you need to understand the history and critical details on ESI data sources. These ‘system ’ or ‘perpetual’ custodians are named in almost every legal hold. Their departure can have a disproportionate impact on discovery events unless they can properly document and transfer knowledge prior to their departure. It took me a solid month to create the ‘discovery bible’ documenting process and sources when I left my last position as the ‘corporate custodian of record’ back in 2006. We had a contract in place to cover any future calls, affidavits or testimony that was reviewed and approved by Symantec’s legal department. That gave my old team confidence that they could call if stuck or needing confirmation. Not every custodian has that flexibility and many do not depart on friendly terms. So how can you mitigate the potential impact of legal hold custodian departures when you know that they are going to happen?

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Corporate Matter Management
Legal Hold Notification
Corporate eDiscovery Platform

LegalTech 2014 – Under the Weather?

03 - 03 - 2014

michael simon

Even compared to some of the bad years of the past (anyone recall 2008?), 2013 was a tough year for many vendors in the legal community, and this clearly showed at LegalTech. Attendance was down and much of the exhibit floor looked bleak. Even the “official line” seems rather tepid this year, as if the show sponsors are not even trying to put a happy face on this one.

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Markets

SharePoint eDiscovery Tools: On-Premise and Office 365

02 - 24 - 2014

Greg Buckles

2014 is shaping up to be a good year for Microsoft when it comes to SharePoint migrations and/or Office 365 adoption. Consulting client inquires have had me writing, speaking and researching about the new Microsoft eDiscovery Center and the overall challenges/benefits of launching corporate ESI to the cloud. But enterprise migrations require many months of planning, user education and testing prior to moving email and files. I am seeing conservative enterprise clients estimating 12-18 months as a realistic project lifecycle when assessing upgrades and migrations. That creates a need for interim tools to perform eDiscovery collections from on-premise SharePoint and/or cloud SharePoint in Office 365 environment. Since some IT groups have a tendency to kick off pilot projects without consulting legal or compliance, I can see many companies having a short-term need for a collection tool where they do not want to commit to a full ‘eDiscovery platform’. Thus the inspiration to update the SharePoint Collection category in the eDJ Matrix and add a new category just for Office 365 Collection.

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Office 365 Collection

Cloud ESI Collection
SharePoint Collection