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Electronic Discovery

Facebook Will Shift to Emphasize Encrypted Ephemeral Messages, Zuckerberg Says: eDiscovery Trends

In a post to Facebook last week, founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined a vision of the future that includes end-to-end encryption and an ephemeral lifespan for private messages and photos.  Zuckerberg said that encryption will be one of the keys to Facebook’s future — and that the company is willing to be banned in countries that refuse to let it operate as a result.

According to The Verge (Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will shift to emphasize encrypted ephemeral messages, written by Casey Newton), Zuckerberg wrote in a 3,200 word “missive”: “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms.  Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.”

Public social networks have their place, Zuckerberg added, but he sees a large future opportunity built on “a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.” That would mark a sharp reversal for Facebook, which has grown into one of the world’s wealthiest companies by inventing exotic new methods of personal data collection and allowing brands to sell advertising against it. Facebook has spent the past two years mired in scandals around data privacy, starting with last year’s revelations around Cambridge Analytica and continuing through the biggest data breach in company history.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg says. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.“

From an eDiscovery standpoint, the ability to customize the lifespan of messages could wreak havoc, as discussed in this article in Legaltech News®, written by Frank Ready:

“The biggest problem is how are we going to train lawyers [and] how are they going to train their clients to preserve it?” said attorney and forensic technologist Craig Ball.  “A lot of people got into hot water or at least had to try to extricate themselves from hot water because they failed to disable the auto-delete, auto-purge function of their email collections,” Ball said.

Now, they may need to remember to change the settings for their Facebook messages as well when litigation hits.

“People don’t really have an appreciation for social media being evidence and so people will on occasion just delete things, not thinking they are doing anything bad,” said Mary Mack, executive director of the Association of Certified E-discovery Specialists (ACEDS).

Of course, ephemeral messaging has already been at issue in litigation, with the Waymo v. Uber case and Uber’s use of Wickr, an ephemeral messaging application, for internal communications.  Waymo contended that Uber was using Wickr to “hide the ball” with regard to its internal communications, but California District Judge William Alsup declined to severely sanction Uber, given that Waymo was also using its own ephemeral messaging app for communications.

Of course, there is no duty to preserve those messages until litigation is anticipated.  As Kelly Twigger, CEO of eDiscovery Assistant noted, “We’re surmising at this point but you might start to see, you know, a lot more attention paid to what is the date that the duty to preserve arises.”

We’ll see.  Craig, Mary and Kelly will be among the many eDiscovery experts that will be at the University of Florida E-Discovery Conference next week (I’m honored to be there again too!).  While it’s my understanding that the conference is booked as far as in-person attendance, you can still register for livestream attendance here.

So, what do you think?  Will ephemeral messaging make things easier or harder for attorneys?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

The Enron Data Set is No Longer a Representative Test Data Set: eDiscovery Best Practices

If you attend any legal technology conference where eDiscovery software vendors are showing their latest software developments, you may have noticed the data that is used to illustrate features and capabilities by many of the vendors – it’s data from the old Enron investigation.  The Enron Data Set has remained the go-to data set for years as the best source of high-volume data to be used for demos and software testing.  And, it’s still good for software demos.  But, it’s no longer a representative test data set for testing processing – at least not as it’s constituted – and it hasn’t been for a good while.  Let’s see why.

But first, here’s a reminder of what the Enron Data Set is.

The data set is public domain data from Enron Corporation that originated from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Enron Investigation (you can still access that information here).  The original data set consists of:

  • Email: Data consisting of 92% of Enron’s staff emails;
  • Scanned documents: 150,000 scanned pages in TIFF format of documents provided to FERC during the investigation, accompanied by OCR generated text of the images;
  • Transcripts: 40 transcripts related to the case.

Over eight years ago, EDRM created a Data Set project that took the email and generated PST files for each of the custodians (about 170 PST files for 151 custodians).  Roughly 34.5 GB in 153 zip files, probably two to three times that size unzipped (I haven’t recently unzipped it all to check the exact size).  The Enron emails were originally in Lotus Notes databases, so the PSTs created aren’t a perfect rendition of what they might look like if they originated in Outlook (for example, there are a lot of internal Exchange addresses vs. SMTP email addresses), but it still has been a really useful good sized collection for demo and test data.  EDRM has also since created some micro test data sets, which are good for specific test cases, but not high volume.

As people began to use the data, it became apparent that there was a lot of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) contained in the set, including social security numbers and credit card numbers (back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was nowhere near the concern about data privacy as there is today).  So, a couple of years later, EDRM partnered with NUIX to “clean” the data of PII and they removed thousands of emails with PII (though a number of people identified additional PII after that process was complete, so be careful).

If there are comparable high-volume public domain collections that are representative of a typical email collection for discovery, I haven’t seen them (and, believe me, I have looked).  Sure, you can get a high-volume dump of data from Wikipedia or other sites out there, but that’s not indicative of a typical eDiscovery data set.  If any of you out there know of any that are, I’m all ears.

Until then, the EDRM Enron Data Set remains the gold-standard as the best high-volume example of a public domain email collection.  So, why isn’t it a good test data set anymore for processing?

Do you remember the days when Microsoft Outlook limited the size of a PST file to 2 GB?  Outlook 2002 and earlier versions limited the size of PST files to 2 GB.  Years ago, that was about the largest PST file we typically had to process in eDiscovery.  Since Outlook 2003, a new PST file format has been used, which supports Unicode and doesn’t have the 2 GB size limit any more.  Now, in discovery, we routinely see PST files that are 20, 30, 40 or even more GB in a single file.

What difference does it make?  The challenge today with large mailstore files like these (as well as large container files, including ZIP and forensic containers) is that single-threaded processes bog down on these large files and they can take a long time to process.  These days, to get through large files like these more quickly, you need multi-threaded processing capabilities and the ability to throw multiple agents at these files to get them processed in a fraction of the time.  As an example, we’ve seen processing throughput increased 400-600% with multi-threaded ingestion using CloudNine’s LAW product compared to single-threaded processes (a reduction of processing time from over 24 hours to a little over 4 hours in a recent example).  Large container files are very typical in eDiscovery collections today and many PST files we see today are anywhere from 10 GB to more than 50 GB in size.  They’re becoming the standard in most eDiscovery email collections.

As I mentioned, the Enron Data Set is 170 PST files over 151 custodians, with some of the larger custodians’ collections broken into multiple PST files (one custodian has 11 PST files in the collection).  But, none of them are over 2 GB in size (presumably Lotus Notes had a similar size limit back in the day) and most of them are less than 200 MB.  That’s not indicative of a typical eDiscovery email collection today and wouldn’t provide a representative speed test for processing purposes.

Can the Enron Data Set still be used to benchmark single-threaded vs. multi-threaded processes?  Yes, but not as it’s constituted – to do so, you have to combine them into larger PST files more representative of today’s collections.  We did that at CloudNine and came up with a 42 GB PST file that contains several hundred thousand de-duped emails and attachments.  You could certainly break that up into 2-4 smaller PST files to conduct a test of multiple PST files as well.  That provides a more typical eDiscovery collection in today’s terms – at least on a small scale.

So, when an eDiscovery vendor quotes processing throughput numbers for you, it’s important to know the types of files that they were processing to obtain those metrics.  If they were using the Enron Data Set as is, those numbers may not be as meaningful as you think.  And, if somebody out there is aware of a good, new, large-volume, public domain, “typical” eDiscovery collection with large mailstore and container files (not to mention content from mobile devices and other sources), please let me know!

So, what do you think?  Do you still rely on the Enron Data Set for demo and test data?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

In Lawsuit Over Prince Music, Court Grants Monetary But Not Adverse Inference Sanctions (Yet): eDiscovery Case Law

In Paisley Park Enter., Inc. v. Boxill, No. 17-cv-1212 (WMW/TNL), (D. Minn. Mar. 5, 2019), Minnesota Magistrate Judge Tony N. Leung granted in part the plaintiffs’ Motion for Sanctions Due to Spoliation of Evidence, ordering the Rogue Music Alliance (“RMA”) Defendants to pay reasonable expenses, including attorney’s fees and costs, that Plaintiffs incurred as a result of the RMA Defendants’ “misconduct”, and also ordered the RMA Defendants to pay into the Court a fine of $10,000, but chose to defer consideration of adverse inference instruction sanctions to a later date, closer to trial.

Case Background

In this infringement case involving release of previously unreleased music by the late artist Prince, the estate of Prince filed suit against George Ian Boxill, a sound engineer who worked with Prince and allegedly took tracks of certain songs that he worked on with Prince in April 2017, as well as RMA and Deliverance, LLC.  The plaintiffs subsequently added David Staley and Gabriel Solomon Wilson (principals of RMA and Deliverance) and two law firms in June 2018 to the lawsuit.

In December 2017, after Plaintiffs filed their first amended complaint, they, RMA, Deliverance, and Boxill, stipulated to certain protocols regarding the discovery of ESI in which the parties indicated that they had taken “reasonable steps to preserve reasonably accessible sources of ESI.”  The Court then issued its pretrial scheduling order in January 2018, directing the parties to preserve “all electronic documents that bear on any claims, defenses, or the subject matter of this lawsuit.”

During discovery, the plaintiffs received a third-party production of documents from a public relations firm that the defendants had hired which included text messages that Wilson sent to an employee of the public relations firm. The plaintiffs then filed a motion to compel discovery from RMA, seeking production of text messages that Staley and Wilson sent to each other and third parties and the Court ordered the defendants to produce all responsive text messages on July 19, 2018.  During a meet and confer in September 2018, counsel for Wilson, Staley, RMA and Deliverance indicated that they could not produce responsive text messages because they had not preserved their text messages, indicating that text messages had not been preserved because Staley and Wilson did not disengage the auto-delete function on their phones and because Staley had wiped and discarded his phone in October 2017 and Wilson had wiped and discarded his phone in January 2018 and then wiped and discard his new phone in May 2018.  No back-up data existed for either phone, leading to the plaintiffs’ motion for sanctions under Rule 37(e)(1), 37(e)(2) and 37(b)(2)(A).

Judge’s Ruling

With regard to the defendants’ duty to preserve, Judge Leung ruled that “the duty to preserve evidence arose no later than February 11, 2017, when Staley sent an e-mail regarding his plans to release the music at issue here. In that e-mail, Staley acknowledged the riskiness of his and RMA’s position and indicated that the Prince Estate could challenge their actions. Staley referred specifically to the possibility of litigation in that e-mail, noting that RMA was not concerned by a lawsuit because it had been indemnified by Boxill. It is apparent, based on this letter, that the RMA Defendants anticipated litigation following their release of the Prince music.”

With regard to whether the defendants took reasonable steps to preserve relevant ESI, Judge Leung noted that “It takes, at most, only a few minutes to disengage the auto-delete function on a cell phone” and stated “Failure to follow the simple steps detailed above alone is sufficient to show that Defendants acted unreasonably.”  He then added:

“But that is not all the RMA Defendants did and did not do. Most troubling of all, they wiped and destroyed their phones after Deliverance and RMA had been sued, and, in the second instance for Wilson, after the Court ordered the parties to preserve all relevant electronic information, after the parties had entered into an agreement regarding the preservation and production of ESI, and after Plaintiffs had sent Defendants a letter alerting them to the fact they needed to produce their text messages. As Plaintiffs note, had Staley and Wilson not destroyed their phones, it is possible that Plaintiffs might have been able to recover the missing text messages by use of the “cloud” function or through consultation with a software expert. But the content will never be known because of Staley and Wilson’s intentional acts. The RMA Defendants’ failure to even consider whether Staley and Wilson’s phones might have discoverable information before destroying them was completely unreasonable. This is even more egregious because litigation had already commenced.”

Judge Leung rejected several arguments from the defendants as to why their decision not to preserve text messages was reasonable, including the claim that “they could not possibly be expected to know that they should preserve text messages”, stating “None of these arguments is persuasive”.  Judge Leung also found that “There is no doubt that Plaintiffs are prejudiced by the loss of the text messages.”  But, with regard to the adverse inference sanctions sought by the plaintiffs, he also said that “given the fact that discovery is still on-going, the record is not yet closed, and the case is still some time from trial, the Court believes it more appropriate to defer consideration of those sanctions to a later date, closer to trial”.  He did, however, order the RMA Defendants to “pay reasonable expenses, including attorney’s fees and costs, that Plaintiffs incurred as a result of the RMA Defendants’ misconduct” and also ordered the RMA Defendants to pay into the Court a fine of $10,000.

So, what do you think?  Should the defendants have received the adverse inference sanction as well?  Please let us know if any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

For more info on this ruling, check out Ralph Losey’s e-Discovery Team® blog here.

Case opinion link courtesy of eDiscovery Assistant.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Now, Wait Just an Internet Minute!: eDiscovery Trends

Have I mentioned lately that I love…an infographic?  Well, let me mention it again!  The past three years, we’ve taken a look at a terrific infographic each year that illustrated what happens within the internet in a typical minute.  Last week, the 2019 internet minute graphic came out, so, let’s take a look at what happens in an internet minute in 2019.

The updated graphic shown above, once again created by Lori Lewis, illustrates what happens within the internet in a typical minute in 2019.  As always, there are a couple of different categories tracked in this graphic than last year’s, but most are the same and those that are carried forward are, once again, (almost) all up compared to last year – some more than others.  Once again, Netflix more than doubled and Instagram nearly doubled, while others sources showed more incremental gains.

Here is a comparison between 2018 and 2019 (we previously published the graphic for 2016 and 2017):

Needless to say, I’ll be discussing this in my presentation next week at the University of Florida E-Discovery Conference.

In her post, Lori also goes through some of her observations on the trends.  Once again, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the numbers, so take them for what it’s worth.  So, why do I love infographics so much?  One reason is because they make my job easier!  :o)

So, what do you think?  How have the challenges of various sources of data affected your organization?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

According to Consilio, Strong Majority of Companies are Increasing Investment in Detecting “Bad Behaviors”: eDiscovery Trends

As I’ll be discussing in my presentation next week at the University of Florida E-Discovery Conference, there are a lot of reasons why organizations should be focusing a lot more of their eDiscovery efforts on compliance and investigations.  Last week, Consilio released the results of a survey that indicates that they appear to be doing just that.

In their release which details the results of a survey of 138 legal professionals conducted at this year’s Legalweek conference in New York, the majority of legal professionals (77 percent) believe their companies have either “somewhat” or “to a great extent” increased investment in resources to detect “bad behaviors” that go against the company’s mission (i.e. discrimination, sexual harassment, fraud, IP theft, etc.).

The survey also found that many organizations use more than one approach to facilitate investigations, though most were handled internally through the compliance department (66 percent) and/or investigations department (45 percent). In addition, 28 percent of respondents said their companies facilitate investigations externally through a law firm, followed by investigations facilitated via consultants at 16 percent.

“Compliance departments that are running most internal investigations often are better equipped to detect financial vs. non-financial corporate misconduct such as fraud or embezzlement,” said Roger Miller, Managing Director at Consilio. “In our experience, technology used by compliance departments largely relies on simple keyword and/or number-based searches. However, detection of non-financial wrongdoing at companies through digital communications like email, IM, and text is opaque and often requires more sophisticated technology, such as contextual analytics to identify.”

Miller went on to comment, “In a hypothetical keyword search to detect the occurrence of bribery in a company, contextual analytics provide the ability to search for the definition of the word “bribe” or use its legal definition in the FCPA and/or UK Bribery Act. This technology allows investigators to identify incriminating document(s) even if a bad actor is trying to obfuscate their misconduct.”

Respondents cited fraud (72 percent) among the most common types of investigations at their company, to their knowledge. This was followed by non-financial “bad behaviors” including: discrimination (60 percent), IP theft (52 percent), and sexual harassment (51 percent). The least common investigations cited were tied to antitrust/pricing fixing (42 percent) and the FCPA/UK Bribery Act (29 percent).

Interestingly, 62 percent of legal professionals said that they are very confident their company is proactively identifying “bad behaviors” that go against the company’s mission. Further, when asked whether their company has existing policies and/or technology, such as financial or behavioral audits and communication monitoring, to identify high risk behavior in employees, an overwhelming majority (74 percent) said these measures are in place.

Those numbers surprise me, given the challenge of big data, the increasing variety of data sources to track and the reported lack of companies that have a formal information governance policy.  Do these companies really have things as under control as they indicated?  I wonder.

So, what do you think?  Are you surprised by any of these stats?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology, Part Six

Editor’s Note: Tom O’Connor is a nationally known consultant, speaker, and writer in the field of computerized litigation support systems.  He has also been a great addition to our webinar program, participating with me on several recent webinars.  Tom has also written several terrific informational overview series for CloudNine, including his most recent one, Will Lawyers Ever Embrace Technology?, which we covered as part of a webcast on November 28 of last year.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding blockchain and legal technology titled Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into six parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  Part one was last Monday, part two was last Wednesday, part three was last Friday, part four was this Monday and part five was this Wednesday, here’s the sixth and final part.

Conclusions

So, where do we go from here from a legal technology standpoint?  Let’s take a look at some current developments.

Current Developments

Much of the momentum that I saw gathering at ILTACON17 led to the establishment of the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium. Members of the consortium include the law firms Baker Hostetler and Orrick, as well as IBM Watson Legal. Their goal is to explore how blockchain technology can solve real-world legal problems as well as drive the adoption and standardization of blockchain in the legal industry.

The consortium is not the only such effort. The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a cross-industry collaborative blockchain consortium aiming to leverage open-source Ethereum technology for enterprise solutions, has a” Legal Industry Working Group”. Members of that group include Cooley, Debevoise & Plimpton, Goodwin, Hogan Lovells, Holland & Knight, Jones Day, Latham & Watkins, Morrison & Foerster, Perkins Coie, Shearman & Sterling, Cardozo Law School, Duke Center on Law & Technology, and the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The consortium held a kick-off event called the MIT Legal Forum on AI + Blockchain in the fall of 2017. Although that effort appears to have slowed in 2018, ongoing efforts can be monitored on the EEA site. For a more in-depth report on the subject, see  Bob Ambrogi’s “Law Sites” blog post

Final Thoughts

It’s clear that blockchain has become a breakthrough topic and I expect to see much more development for legal applications in the near future. One of the challenges is how middle market clients which do not have the extensive systems that a large company might have can effectively leverage this technology and Grant Thornton is one of the players focused on this market.

Proponents will have to continue their efforts to lower uncertainty about blockchain systems stability and increase its profile as a serious business tool.  I expect to see both of those occur as the year continues.

So, what do you think?  Do you better understand blockchain now and how it can impact the legal profession?  We hope so!  And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Here’s a Webcast to Learn about Blockchain and How it Impacts Legal Technology: eDiscovery Webcasts

Miss our webcasts?  We’re back!  If you think you’re hearing more and more about blockchain and bitcoin, you’re probably right. Blockchain is even being discussed as having potential application in legal technology and electronic discovery. But, what exactly is it? How does it work? And, how do you need to be prepared to address it as a legal professional?  Here’s a webcast that will answer those questions – and more!

Wednesday, March 27th at noon CST (1:00pm EST, 10:00am PST), CloudNine will conduct the webcast Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology. In this one-hour webcast that’s CLE-approved in selected states, we will discuss, define and describe blockchain and how it can apply to legal technology and eDiscovery today and in the future. Topics include:

  • History of Blockchain and Bitcoin
  • Defining Key Terms
  • How Blockchain Works
  • Advantages and Challenges of Blockchain
  • Smart Contracts and Other Use Cases for Blockchain
  • Impacts of Blockchain on Legal Technology and eDiscovery
  • Is Blockchain Really as Secure as People Think?
  • Future of Blockchain
  • Resources for More Info

As always, I’ll be presenting the webcast, along with Tom O’Connor, whose white paper of the same name is concluding tomorrow on this blog!  To register for it, click here.  Even if you can’t make it, go ahead and register to get a link to the slides and to the recording of the webcast (if you want to check it out later).  If you want to learn about blockchain and how it can affect your job as a legal professional, this webcast is for you!

So, what do you think?  Do you know the ins and outs of blockchain or even how it works?  If not, please join us!  If so, please join us anyway!  :o)  And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

The March Toward Technology Competence (and Possibly Predictive Coding Adoption) Continues: eDiscovery Best Practices

I know, because it’s “March”, right?  :o)  Anyway, it’s about time is all I can say.  My home state of Texas has finally added its name to the list of states that have adopted the ethical duty of technology competence for lawyers, becoming the 36th state to do so.  And, we have a new predictive coding survey to check out.

As discussed on Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites blog, just last week (February 26), the Supreme Court of Texas entered an order amending Paragraph 8 of Rule 1.01 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct. The amended comment now reads (emphasis added):

Maintaining Competence

  1. Because of the vital role of lawyers in the legal process, each lawyer should strive to become and remain proficient and competent in the practice of law, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology. To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill of a competent practitioner, a lawyer should engage in continuing study and education. If a system of peer review has been established, the lawyer should consider making use of it in appropriate circumstances. Isolated instances of faulty conduct or decision should be identified for purposes of additional study or instruction.

The new phrase in italics above mirrors the one adopted in 2012 by the American Bar Association in amending the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to make clear that lawyers have a duty to be competent not only in the law and its practice, but also in technology.  Hard to believe it’s been seven years already!  Now, we’re up to 36 states that have formally adopted this duty of technology competence.  Just 14 to go!

Also, this weekend, Rob Robinson published the results of the Predictive Coding Technologies and Protocols Spring 2019 Survey on his excellent Complex Discovery blog.  Like the first version of the survey he conducted back in September last year, the “non-scientific” survey designed to help provide a general understanding of the use of predictive coding technologies, protocols, and workflows by data discovery and legal discovery professionals within the eDiscovery ecosystem.  This survey had 40 respondents, up from 31 the last time.

I won’t steal Rob’s thunder, but here are a couple of notable stats:

  • Approximately 62% of responders (62.5%) use more than one predictive coding technology in their predictive coding efforts: That’s considerably higher than I would have guessed;
  • Continuous Active Learning (CAL) was the most used predictive coding protocol with 80% of responders reporting that they use it in their predictive coding efforts: I would have expected that CAL was the leader, but not as dominant as these stats show; and
  • 95% of responders use technology-assisted review in more than one area of data and legal discovery: Which seems a good sign to me that practitioners aren’t just limiting it to identification of relevant documents in review anymore.

Rob’s findings, including several charts, can be found here.

So, what do you think?  Which state will be next to adopt an ethical duty of technology competence for lawyers?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology, Part Four

Editor’s Note: Tom O’Connor is a nationally known consultant, speaker, and writer in the field of computerized litigation support systems.  He has also been a great addition to our webinar program, participating with me on several recent webinars.  Tom has also written several terrific informational overview series for CloudNine, including his most recent one, Will Lawyers Ever Embrace Technology?, which we covered as part of a webcast on November 28 of last year.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding blockchain and legal technology titled Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into six parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  Part one was last Monday, part two was last Wednesday and part three was last Friday, here’s the fourth part.

General Use Cases for Blockchain

Several actual examples may show the actual utility of blockchain.

Searching

In 2001, Microsoft researchers, Banko and Brill, released a paper Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation,  which described how most work in the area of natural language processing was on small data sets of less than a million words. Error rates for algorithms such as Naive Bayes and Perceptrons were 25%, while newer memory-based algorithms achieved 19% error rates.

But as they added MORE data — not just a bit more, but orders of magnitude more — and kept the algorithms the same, then the error rates kept going down. A dataset which was three orders of magnitude larger had an error rate of less than 5%.  Even more surprising, the best-performing algorithms were the simplest and always outperformed more state-of-the-art systems.

Then, in 2007, Google researchers, Halevy, Norvig and Pereira, published a paper called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data  showing how data could be “unreasonably effective” across many AI domains. Hence, the rise of deep learning systems and the reemergence of backprop neural networks from the ’80s which are equally effective in massive datasets with more recent technologies.

So decentralized and shared control typically leads to better performing  models.  And since the decentralized nature of blockchains encourages data sharing, it works better whether the network is local or worldwide.

Security

Blockchain eliminates the risks that come with centralized data because it stores data across the network. Thus, it doesn’t have centralized points of vulnerability that computer hackers traditionally exploit. No more “username/password” systems, but rather encryption technology and constantly updating audit trails

A blockchain, as the name implies, is a chain of digital “blocks” that contain records of transactions. The records on a blockchain are secured through cryptography and network participants have their own private keys that are assigned to the transactions they make and act as a personal digital signature.

However, despite inherent properties that provide security, known vulnerabilities in your infrastructure can be manipulated by hackers. Any system supporting blockchain should have these capabilities at a minimum:

  • Be able to prevent anyone, up to and including administrators, from accessing sensitive information
  • Ability to deny illicit attempts to change data or applications within the network.
  • Use highest-grade security standards to protect encryption keys

We’ll publish Part 5 – General Use Cases for Blockchain – on Wednesday.

So, what do you think?  Do you understand blockchain and how it can impact the legal profession?  If not, keep reading!  And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology, Part Three

Editor’s Note: Tom O’Connor is a nationally known consultant, speaker, and writer in the field of computerized litigation support systems.  He has also been a great addition to our webinar program, participating with me on several recent webinars.  Tom has also written several terrific informational overview series for CloudNine, including his most recent one, Will Lawyers Ever Embrace Technology?, which we covered as part of a webcast on November 28 of last year.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding blockchain and legal technology titled Understanding Blockchain and its Impact on Legal Technology that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into six parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  Part one was Monday and part two was Wednesday, here’s the third part.

Advantages and Challenges of Blockchain

So, why is blockchain becoming more popular and what advantages are associated with it?  And, if it’s so great, why aren’t more people using it?

Advantages of Blockchain

Blockchain has several structural advantages:

  • Establishes a definitive record for a given transaction
  • An organization can embed the verification for the transaction within the transactional record itself,
  • It is readily accessible
  • It is easily verifiable
  • It is immutable
  • It is transparent
  • Offers assurance across all transactions subject to the blockchain.
  • Allows full testing of the population in its entirety
  • Allows reliable spot-checks at any time
  • No need for third party audit to sample a portion of transactions and extrapolate from the sample based upon statistical probabilities because blockchain exposes the full population of transactions

Challenges to Blockchain Adoption

At the same time, Blockchain faces several distinct challenges to widespread adoption, including:

  • Business leaders want practical solutions and blockchain is still considered by many to be an esoteric solution
  • Are their blockchain standards to which businesses can refer?
  • Are distributed ledgers actually slower than centralized ones?
  • Are distributed ledgers easily available to all users?
  • How secure are distributed ledgers?
  • Can privacy be assured in a blockchain scheme?
  • How does security differ in public vs private blockchains?

We’ll publish Part 4 – General Use Cases for Blockchain – next Monday.

So, what do you think?  Do you understand blockchain and how it can impact the legal profession?  If not, keep reading!  And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.