Close
Enter your
text here

Industry Trends

ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO, Part Four: eDiscovery Trends

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 also wrote a terrific four part informational overview on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) titled eDiscovery and the GDPR: Ready or Not, Here it Comes (and participated with me on a webcast on the same topic) and wrote another terrific five part informational overview on Understanding eDiscovery in Criminal Cases.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding Alternative Legal Service Providers titled ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into four parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  We covered part one on March 8 and parts two and three last Monday and Thursday.  Here’s the final part, part four.

What does this mean for the future of ALSPs?

According to the Thomson Reuters report, ALSPs are likely to continue to expand as the complexity and specialization of legal services grows. Additionally, we can expect that even more areas of ALSP specialization will develop. Some of the AM Law 50 and Fortune 50 may still choose to keep their work in-house due to their high level of internal resource or pains endured in the past with ALSPs, but the overall market for ALSP services in the rest of the legal profession should continue to expand.

Specifically, the report showed that while only 38 percent of law firms use a litigation support ALSP now, another 15 percent said they would be likely to use them in the next year. And among regulatory risk and compliance services for corporations, the number of users increases 13 percent for new users within the next year.

The biggest driver? Technology. Firms and companies interviewed for the report identified a number of different technologies they hoped ALSPs would use in the near future, including:

  • artificial intelligence,
  • contract management,
  • process mapping, and
  • workflow technology.

Eric Laughlin, Managing Director of Legal Services at Thomson Reuters, noted that in many cases, these are technologies that are still in the nascent stages in firms or legal departments, saying:

“I think it shows that while legal departments and law firms either haven’t been able to adopt yet because of budget, or perhaps because of the scale, they have high expectations that ALSPs will use technology to their advantage.”

Will there be growth pains? Undoubtedly.  The Thomson Reuters report mentions several areas that law firms and corporations would like clarified before adopting ALSPs, including:

  • 59 percent of law firms that do not use ALSPs cited data security as the main reason,
  • 54 percent of law firms cited quality of service as an inhibitor,
  • 43 percent of corporate users also cited quality of service as a negative, and
  • 43 percent of corporate users cited failure to actually reduce costs as the most negative factor.

The Legaltech New York panel mentioned earlier highlighted these factors, with security getting the most attention. However, the panel suggested these issues may revolve mainly around market education and getting potential customers more familiar with and gaining experience using ALSPs, rather than being insurmountable barriers to continued growth.

The panel also discussed the potential growth in the ALSP market and opined that ALSPs may be viewed as complementary, rather than competitive to firms, helping firms be more efficient and competitive. Since an ALSP is not a law firm, it can often provide one or more services that law firms might offer, but at a lower cost with increased expertise, flexibility, and speed.

Also, because they do not have to adhere to the structure and hierarchy of a law firm, an ALSP can more quickly change business practices to increase efficiency using technology or other innovative practices. Since clients have traditionally preferred having a single point of contact for all their legal business, this would seem to open the door to the opportunity for the law firm or GC to partner with ALSPs to offer cost-effective models for their clients.

What will that future ALSP included hierarchy look like?  First and foremost, it will require good project management skills. Well known legal consultant Casey Flaherty, Principal of the legal operations consulting company Procertas, was recently quoted as saying:

“Most successful users of ALSPs will tell you that… once they took time to train the provider and work to establish a common understanding for the product, the returns on the investment were spectacular.”

So more and more, ALSPs will become partners in legal work more than merely hired vendors. And like all partners in the legal process, the relationship will be ongoing and not simply oriented around one deliverable task.

“The future is now,” Fenwick & West LLP’s Robert Brownstone, who led the Legaltech panel on ALSPs, tells any and everyone who will listen. Brownstone often points out that “it is the rare law firm or legal department that can adequately ramp up – and keep up – on technology, project management and innovation. By planting their flag, ALSPs have provided legal departments not only with a wider array of choices but also a lever to pressure law firms to adjust to the new normal.”

So, while the future appears to be bright for ALSPs, the future also appears to be now.

So, what do you think?  Have you used an ALSP before?  And, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Also, it’s notable that Tom’s post is today because I (Doug) want to thank JD Supra and its readership for CloudNine being named the Readers’ Choice Top Firm in eDiscovery for the second straight year!  And, Tom and I were named two of the top four authors in the Readers’ Choice awards for eDiscovery!  I’m honored to be named for the second year in a row!  Distribution of our posts via JD Supra has continued to grow our readership greatly and I really appreciate our partnership with JD Supra and thank all of you for reading our blog, whether it’s via JD Supra or the “old fashioned way” via our site!  Thank you so much!

And, today our blog has been around for 7 1/2 years!  And, we are up to 1,942 lifetime posts!  Thanks to all of you of support and readership of the blog and making it all possible.  We wouldn’t write it if y’all didn’t read it!  :o)

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.

Mary Mack of ACEDS: eDiscovery Trends 2018

This is the second of the 2018 Legaltech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscovery Daily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year (and some afterward) to get their observations regarding trends at the show and generally within the eDiscovery industry.

Today’s thought leader is Mary Mack of ACEDS.  Mary is the Executive Director of the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists (ACEDS).  E-discovery luminary and recipient of the Masters Conference Educator of the Year 2016, Mary provides ACEDS and its membership more than a decade of strong credibility and sound leadership within the e-discovery community. Mary is the author of A Process of Illumination: The Practical Guide to Electronic Discovery, considered by many to be the first popular book on e-discovery. She is the co-editor of the Thomson Reuters West treatise, eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel.

What have your impressions of LTNY been this year?

{Interviewed Mary the last morning of the conference}

We’re on the downhill slide today and I’m so happy – these shows are a lot of fun, but a lot of work too. A highlight for me was the gathering of our NYC chapter attendees followed by our annual #DrinksWithDougAndMary community happy hour at Ruth’s Chris, sponsored by our fantastic affiliates CloudNine and Compliance Discovery Solutions. Thank you so much for that!  It was packed from 4pm on with everyone representing from the Hon. Judge Peck to our newest CEDS certified person. The other thing that was fun was that our other chapter leadership was in attendance and our chapters look forward to this event every year.

Another highlight for me was the number of great people taking #eDiscoveryRockstar selfies at our booth behind our big backdrop!

I was on a session yesterday with David Horrigan, Bill Hamilton, Dan Katz, Laura Norris and Judge Rodriguez, which was fabulous. I thought it was well attended and the audience was a very mixed group. At the end, the panel asked for predictions and then we had buzzers where we could agree with the predictions, so it was like a round robin prediction. My prediction was The Rise of the Legal Engineer, which (I think) got three “yes” votes and one “no” vote from the other panelists.  Then, after the session was over, one of the attendees came up to me from Airbus with his name tag which indicated that he is a legal engineer.  I decided he had come from the future and they had figured that all out already!

That was a nice session and I’m glad I got to participate in it.  Other than that, this is (unfortunately for me) a business conference, so I’m not able to see as much content as I’d like to, session wise. I’m going to have to depend on the recorded versions.  There were some very nice keynotes, I heard, so I look forward to checking those out particularly.

ACEDS had a great reception Tuesday night at the offices of Thomson Reuters, who is one of our partners.  They very graciously put a reception in their Customer Experience Center, with a view of Times Square right where the New Year’s Eve ball drops down. We had three judges for the content part (Honorable Judges James C. Francis IV, David Waxse and Xavier Rodriguez), but we also had a meet-and-greet with the press, with video of the authors that have been so graciously contributing to get some visibility for the work that they’ve been doing.  Discovery counsel like Nick Ackerman from Dorsey and David Keyko from Pillsbury and Hampton Coley of Canon, former Cravath and Debbie Reynolds from Eimer Stahl.  As for the judges who participated, we had a lovely discussion with Judge Waxse who’s fully retired now and still bringing it down to a level that everybody can understand with storytelling and things of that nature.  And, we had Judge Francis who’s got his Microsoft Ireland case going up to the Supreme Court and he was handicapping how that ruling might go.   We also had comments from Judge Rodriguez, of course, who is so forward-thinking on access to justice and how we’re going to better do that and some of the other aspects of our practice.

Speaking of the Microsoft Ireland case, what are your thoughts about that case? Do you have any expectations or predictions as how it’s going to go?

It’s interesting because I think maybe last month I would have said that the Supreme Court would have said yes, you can get the data. And now, maybe this week I’m thinking with all the data privacy stuff that’s going on in the news that they might say no. That maybe they’ll take a look at it but it might really drastically hurt our commercial technical business, from a US perspective, unless we do something rational around it for privacy purposes.

You have the Microsoft case and then also you have GDPR looming. This year seems to be a particular focus on data privacy, more so than it seems in previous years. What are your thoughts about that, where do you think organizations stand in getting ready for GDPR?

I don’t think organizations are anywhere near ready. I think they’ll be still trying to get ready when the first fines come down. My sense is that there will be fines levied that are rather large and, to me, the climate feels like someone’s going to get a fine pretty early.  Though I may be way wrong on that, I thought maybe UK bribery would be big and it wasn’t. It turned out to be a non-issue, really.

Were there any other topics that stood out for you in this year’s session, that you think are the key topics that people are talking about here at the conference?

Business-wise, I think the most talked about topic is consolidation, and that the downstream effects of that are people’s employment and business aspects. I think that that’s palpable here.  It’s going to be really interesting to see the next quarterly business confidence survey that Rob Robinson does. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a drop in confidence if the people who get consolidated out fill out a survey.  Who knows?  To date, it’s been pretty sunny, I think.  This conference certainly reflects the consolidation.  Certainly the number of people who are buying booths is lower.  Although, it’d be interesting to get the statistics for the satellite suites that aren’t here because that is still going on. For me, it feels less attended than last year — both from the exhibitors as well as attendees.

If you were queen of LTNY for a year, what changes would you make?

If it’s in January, I’d hold it in Florida. {laughs}  Seriously, though, I know that’s not possible. I do think it was a mistake to ‘X’ out the consultants and the partners – I feel that $2,500 entrance fee to the exhibit hall was punitive and many people didn’t come. I think one of the things I’ve always loved about Legaltech New York is that you could see everybody, in the course of three days. Now I’m not seeing that. People that have come for 15 years are saying they can’t do it now. I think that’s a shame.  I do appreciate that the “looky loos” that come with their little bags and just grab up all the swag, are not there. I do appreciate that, but I think we’re missing part of our population that contributes a great deal.

What else would I do?  I think I would look at how they’re sourcing speakers to make sure it’s more reflective of our community.

What would you like to tell our readers about what ACEDS is doing?

ACEDS is going to take a nap. {laughs}  Seriously, though, we are having all sorts of organic chapter growth all over the world. Last year our UK chapter made us global. This year, Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) is up already. Toronto is coming soon and also Australia.  Then, perhaps Japan, perhaps Abu Dhabi and then around the country in places like Houston, where your CEO Brad Jenkins is the chapter president.  We’re also setting up in Dallas and San Francisco and getting inquiries from LA and Atlanta.  We’re getting an explosion in chapter demand. We’re doing all of that and we have some other things in the works I think that’ll be pretty exciting, especially for our partners, around combining technical certification with our more functional certification.

We’re also doing a ton of webinars.  It seems like we have at least one every week.  Sometimes, we have three.  We found that separating the pure education from the service product showcases where partners can brag on themselves and focus on their selling proposition works well.  As long as people know you’re doing a demo and that’s what you’re going to do and that’s what they come for, there’s no illusion.  I feel the program helps with the technical competence and the risks and benefits of technology.

And, we’re seeing more attorneys come to the webinars.  We started that last year as an experiment. We thought we’d get 13 people; instead, we’re getting 130 people and that’s for an intro demo. Then, for service providers, it’s people who’ve already self-selected you for a deeper conversation, like the people that are trying to do RFPs and things like that.  They get to do bit of research without necessarily engaging hot and heavy.  And, it’s good for the partners too, who can point people to those webinars to get started learning about them right away.

Last year, we also did the “Ask the Experts” series, which was really fun.  We did that with Jared Coseglia over at TRU Staffing and we’re going to expand that series. Jared is our anchor and he’s got a quarterly report and we will be bringing in some other experts on other areas of career development and technical development topics as well. The format is different: We conduct some poll questions and then the answers of the poll helps shape the conversation. It’s an unscripted, unplugged type of format and it’s highly interactive.  And, we’ve changed what we’re offering, how we offer it, how we talk about it, based on the feedback we’ve gotten from some of those subjects.  Even though you’re not in the same room, it’s about as close as you can get to that during the hour discussion.

Thanks, Mary, for participating in the interview!

Also, we’re getting ever closer to the University of Florida E-Discovery Conference, which will be held on Thursday, March 29.  As always, the conference will be conducted in Gainesville, FL on the University of Florida Levin College of Law campus (as well as being livestreamed), with CLE-accredited sessions all day from 8am to 5:30pm ET.  I (Doug) am on a panel discussion at 9am ET in a session titled Getting Critical Information From The Tough Locations – Cloud, IOT, Social Media, And Smartphones! with Craig Ball, Kelly Twigger, with Judge Amanda Arnold Sansone.  Click here to register for the conference – it’s only $199 for the entire day in person and only $99 for livestream attendance.  Don’t miss it!

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.

ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO, Part Three: eDiscovery Trends

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 also wrote a terrific four part informational overview on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) titled eDiscovery and the GDPR: Ready or Not, Here it Comes (and participated with me on a webcast on the same topic) and wrote another terrific five part informational overview on Understanding eDiscovery in Criminal Cases.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding Alternative Legal Service Providers titled ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into four parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  We covered part one last Thursday and part two on Monday.  Here’s part three.

Who is actually using an ALSP?  And, why are they using them?

Who is actually using an ALSP?  And what is the specific breakdown of these services? The Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute report shows that more than half of law firms and corporations are already using ALSPs with 51 percent of law firms and 60 percent of law departments already using ALSPs in at least one service category.

John Munro, Vice President of National Markets at Blackstone Discovery, was a panelist at a Legaltech New York session discussing the ALSP market. He noted that traditional document review work was once 75 percent of the LPO market but now may be no more than 30 percent of the ALSP market. More and more, ALSPs are playing a bigger role in providing legal services.

Law departments seem to be using ALSPs in specialized areas ranging from regulatory risk & compliance services to specialized legal advice for IP managers and legal researchers.

Law firms however are most likely to use ALSPs for litigation support, especially eDiscovery, document review and pre-litigation investigation.

In a January press release, report co-author Mari Sako, Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School shared that:

“ALSPs are not just about lower cost, but also about access to specialized expertise and alternative modes of delivery.”

But why?

ALSPs were originally seen as a good outsourcing choice simply because of affordability in handling tasks without billing out to an attorney. In 2005, it was purely about the cost savings and the labor arbitrage.  And according to the Thomson Reuters report that still seems to be the case when it comes to tasks such as document review. 85 percent of law firms who use ALSPs said they do so in document review for cost savings and 52 percent said they use them to meet peak document review demand without increasing headcount.

While cost savings still remains a driver, the report confirms how ALSPs today are disaggregating legal processes, that is to say they are providing legal expertise not always available in-house and helping enable greater use of current technology.

Outside of document review though, the need for expertise is increasingly a key factor in selecting an ALSP.  About two-thirds of law firms reported using litigation and investigation support services ALSPs and said their primary reason was the need for access to specialized expertise not available in-house; only one-third cited cost savings as a main factor. A good example of this expertise is Attorney Kelly Twigger and her company, ESI Attorneys. She routinely engages as the eDiscovery expert for law firms and corporate clients because she can provide a depth of ESI experience which they simply cannot bring to the table.

In selecting a non-legal task ALSPs, the percentages were close to the same: 63 percent (expertise driven) and 38 percent (cost-driven), respectively.

For in-house counsel, the four most often selected types of ALSP services beyond eDiscovery and document review were regulatory risk and compliance services, specialized legal services, intellectual property management, and legal research services. The primary reason for selection of these services was access to specialized expertise not available in-house and the difference between this reason and cost was even more pronounced then with private firms, at 77 percent for expertise while only 27 percent for cost savings.

In a statement to Legaltech News during the Legaltech conference in New York earlier this year, Eric Laughlin, Managing Director of Legal Services at Thomson Reuters, noted that

“Having matured in their offerings a little bit, these alternative legal service providers are differentiating based on expertise. And that makes corporations more and more comfortable to reach out to them and use them.”

In addition to expertise, an ALSP can do a much higher volume of work than can the average law firm or legal department. For example, an ALSP specializing in eDiscovery may simply have many more tools and much more robust workflow processes for extracting electronic evidence from terabytes of ESI than any firm or GC office.

This higher volume capability allows their expertise to be applied in a manner that is not only faster but less costly.  The result is that law firms now see that subcontracting services to an ALSP can allow them to focus more on their own core competencies. And corporations which have become more focused on reducing outside legal spend see that using a specialized ALSP rather than a law firm may better serve that purpose.

We’ll publish the final part, Part Four – What does this mean for the future of ALSPs? – next Tuesday.

So, what do you think?  Have you used an ALSP before?  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.

ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO, Part Two: eDiscovery Trends

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 also wrote a terrific four part informational overview on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) titled eDiscovery and the GDPR: Ready or Not, Here it Comes (and participated with me on a webcast on the same topic) and wrote another terrific five part informational overview on Understanding eDiscovery in Criminal Cases.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding Alternative Legal Service Providers titled ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into four parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  We covered part one last Thursday.  Here’s part two.

What is an ALSP?

The first consideration in understanding new generation ALSPs is to understand how ALSP is defined. In general, ALSPs are niche companies that specialize in providing such high-demand legal services as:

  • Human Resources
  • IT Services
  • Document Review
  • Contract Management
  • Litigation Support
  • ECA
  • Analytics
  • Discovery and Electronic Discovery
  • Contract Lawyers and Staffing
  • Investigation Support and Legal Research
  • IP Management
  • Due Diligence

Industries such as banking started outsourcing IT services as a means to reduce costs almost 30 years ago. And now businesses and law firms are doing the same thing in the area of document services by turning to these new generation ALSP companies for even routine legal services that are too expensive and time-consuming to do in-house.

According to the Thompson-Reuters Legal Executive Institute report, there are five categories of ALSPs.

  • Accounting and Audit Firms that have a large amount of revenue in legal services. They tend to focus on high-volume, process-oriented work that’s complementary to accounting-audit work.
  • Captive LPOs that are wholly owned captive operations. Often located in lower-cost regions, they are focused on high-volume process work.
  • Independent LPOs, eDiscovery and Document Review Providers who perform outsourced legal work under the direction of corporate legal departments and law firms. They are typically engaged for matter- or project-based work often proactively managed and globally delivered. This category Includes eDiscovery services and document review providers.
  • Managed Legal Services Providers that contract for all or part of the function of an in-house legal team. They typically are engaged for ongoing work within scope and proactively managed.
  • Contract Lawyers, In-Sourcing, and Staffing Services who are providers of lawyers to companies on a temporary basis. Support can range from entry-level document review to highly skilled and experienced specialists.

So while the term ALSP is a reasonable capstone description for the multiple categories of ALSP specialization, it does appear that using only one term may, in some cases, be an over simplification of a complex grouping of services.

Another characteristic that defines an ALSP is the fact that it is not necessarily a law firm and does not engage in the practice of law nor does it necessarily have to be staffed by lawyers. Because of this characteristic, paralegals, legal assistants, and technical staff with the right type of legal expertise are in great demand at the new generation ALSP.  And more and more work is moving in their direction. According to an October 2013 article in ABA Journal, employment at traditional law firms peaked in 2004 and has declined moderately since then.  During the same time period, employment at ALSPs has doubled.

Although litigation and investigation support ALSPs are the third most-used category of ALSPs for law firms (behind eDiscovery and document review), the report found that they are used by just 28 percent of firms. Twenty-six percent of firms use ALSPs for non-legal factual research and 24 percent of firms use them for specialized legal services.

When breaking down the ALSP services used by corporations, there seems to be even more reluctance to adopt them. Regulatory risk and compliance services are the categories that see the most use proportionally, but even those ALSPs see adoption at only 29 percent. The only other category above 20 percent adoption in corporate legal departments is specialized legal services (21 percent).

Eric Laughlin is the general manager for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. He expects continuing growth for ALSPs, saying this about the report:

“The data says that law firms are recognizing ALSPs for more expertise, so there’s a respect there for what ALSPs are doing. And then their experience in the market is that clients are pushing them more to disaggregate. They’re being asked to look at more models by their clients.”

The numbers in the report bear this out. But, as noted above, the uses go well beyond eDiscovery. ALSP services now extend to a wide variety of activities including not just LPO, managed services, HR, general accounting and so on. David Curle, Director of Strategic Competitive Intelligence for Thomson Reuters Legal, said in another panel at Legaltech that these non-traditional activities provide for roughly $8.4 billion in legal services each year.  While still a fraction of the $700 billion total global spend on legal services, it is an incredibly fast-growing segment of the market.

We’ll publish Part Three – Who is actually using an ALSP and why are they using them? – on Thursday.

So, what do you think?  Have you used an ALSP before?  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.

ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO: eDiscovery Trends

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 also wrote a terrific four part informational overview on Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) titled eDiscovery and the GDPR: Ready or Not, Here it Comes (and participated with me on a webcast on the same topic) and wrote another terrific five part informational overview on Understanding eDiscovery in Criminal Cases.  Now, Tom has written another terrific overview regarding Alternative Legal Service Providers titled ALSP – Not Just Your Daddy’s LPO that we’re happy to share on the eDiscovery Daily blog.  Enjoy! – Doug

Tom’s overview is split into four parts, so we’ll cover each part separately.  Here’s the first part.

Introduction

One of the biggest topics of discussion at the recent Legaltech® conference in New York was Alternative Legal Service Providers or ALSPs.  I was interested in the topic really because I was confused as to what the term ALSP meant. Like several other people I spoke with at the show, I originally considered an ALSP to be just a newer name that marketers had given to legal process outsourcing or LPO.

LPO was, of course, the exporting of legal services to low-wage markets either overseas (off-shore) or in the United States (on-shore). The LPO trend had been fueled by many factors, including:

  • Globalization
  • The rising cost of legal services
  • The growth of the Internet
  • Increased automation of legal processes
  • Developments in data security

In my experience, LPO offerings tended to be focused primarily on low cost document coding or data entry and were utilized primarily by law firms. But the recent rise of ALSP services, which have LPO characteristics, seems to be fueled by corporate law departments that are interested in partners providing software built specifically for their legal and compliance needs.

These growth factors for ALSPs are illustrated in a report from The Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, in partnership with the Georgetown University Law Centre for the Study of the Legal Profession and the University of Oxford Saïd Business School titled The 2017 Alternative Legal Service Study – Understanding the Growth and Benefits of These New Legal Providers (you can download a copy here)  In this global report, more than 800 law firms and corporations were surveyed, and the results indicated that the growing use of a new generation of ALSPs is largely about expertise, not lower costs, as is often assumed.  Other factors in the growing use of ALSPs noted in the study included scalability, client demand for global solutions and greater access to technological innovations.

My focus for the following discussion will be a closer look at the new generation ALSP and the factors that define it.  We will take a look at what an ALSP is, who is actually using an ALSP, why they use them and how they will impact the provision of legal services in the future.

We’ll publish Part 2 – What is an ALSP? – next Monday.

So, what do you think?  Have you used an ALSP before?  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.

According to the IGI, Information Governance Continues To Gain Traction: Information Governance Trends

Last week, the Information Governance Initiative (IGI) released Volume III of their State of Information Governance Report – the third (annual) edition of the Report, which is based on “extensive” surveying of Information Governance (IG) practitioners and providers.  So, is Information Governance gaining traction in organizations? (Well, duh, I gave the answer away in the title of this post, didn’t I?)  :o)

I couldn’t find a total number of respondents mentioned in the report, but it does note that the survey “reached an estimated audience of approximately 100,000 practitioners through our network and those of our partners and Supporters” and that “the majority of respondents came from our own community of IG practitioners.”  For what it’s worth.

Regardless, the report contains several findings, including these highlights:

  • Only 2 percent of respondents have never undertaken an IG project. When compared to last year, the number of respondents reporting they have never undertaken an Information Governance project fell by a dramatic 90 percent.
  • There was a 41 percent rise in the number of professionals who say the IG market is clearly identified, with just over a third of respondents (7 percent) agreeing or strongly agreeing that the IG market is clearly defined.
  • There was also a 26 percent rise in the number of organizations with an IG Steering Committee (to 46 percent) and a 41 percent rise in the number of IG leaders with “Information Governance” in their title (to 52 percent).
  • More organizations are also realizing more business value from their data with those extracting value from data rising from 16 percent last year to 46 percent this year.
  • Integration between IG and cybersecurity programs is accelerating, with 48 percent of respondents agreeing that IG is essential to strong cybersecurity.
  • This year, only 4 percent of respondents reported having no active IG projects – a 64 percent drop from last year. However, according to the respondents, the main barrier to IG progress remains a lack of organizational awareness, so there’s still work to be done.

The report cites a couple of factors as driving greater emphasis on information governance: the Equifax breach, which affected 143 million American citizens and new legal and regulatory developments, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  Regarding GDPR in particular, the report states:

“GDPR asks organizations to zero in on the reasons they store data in the first place. Without consent and justifiable reasons for storing the data, organizations are required to delete it. It is a refocus from an attitude of ‘If in doubt, keep’ to one of ‘If in doubt, delete’. Facing a drive for better governance and defensible deletion across at least a subset of their data, organizations are now beginning to more loudly ask those questions that high-profile data disasters raise: Why does this information exist? Why are we holding on to it? What value does it have, and what kind of risk does it represent?”

Needless to say, GDPR will be a major driver in adoption of information governance.

The report is contained within a 63 page PDF, full of detailed information regarding the state of information governance today, but it also includes a two page state of the industry report “quick read” with some of the key findings on pages 3 and 4 (if you want to hit the highlights quickly).  To download a copy of the report, click here (requires an IGI profile to be set up, which is free).

So, what do you think?  Are you surprised by any of these results?  Does your organization have any active IG projects?  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.

Once Again, Florida is the Place to Be for eDiscovery Education in March: eDiscovery Best Practices

I alluded to it last week, now I’ll discuss it in more depth.  Next month, the University of Florida E-Discovery Conference will be held on Thursday, March 29 – believe it or not, this is the sixth annual conference.  And, for the first time, I’m going to be there!  If you’re going to be in Gainesville then too, great!  If not, you can still attend from the comfort of your desk at work or at home.

But first, this week’s eDiscovery Tech Tip of the Week is about Proximity Searching.  When performing keyword searching, the challenge to performing those searches effectively is to balance recall (retrieving responsive documents with hits) and precision (not retrieving too many non-responsive documents with hits).  One way to achieve that balance is through proximity searching, which is simply searching for two or more words that appear close to each other in the document.  Proximity searching is more precise then an AND search (where two terms can appear in the document together but be completely unrelated) with more recall than a phrase search (where the terms must be exactly together in that order).  It’s an especially useful technique when searching for names, among other things.  So, proximity searching can be a valuable search strategy for striking the proper balance in your search results.

To see an example of how Proximity Searching is conducted using our CloudNine platform, click here (requires BrightTalk account, which is free).

The focus of this year’s UF Law E-Discovery conference is effectively managing the everyday case and they will have interesting sessions throughout the day, covering topics ranging from eDiscovery security and data protection to early assessment of the case and the data to keywords, TAR and AI (do I need to spell out those acronyms anymore?).  Want to know about eDiscovery of the JFK files?  They’ve got it.  Want to get judges’ perspectives on sanctions and other eDiscovery issues?  They’ve got that too.

The panel of speakers is a regular who’s who in eDiscovery, including Craig Ball, George Socha, Kelly Twigger, David Horrigan, Martin Audet, Mary Mack, Rose Jones, Mike Quartararo and also US Magistrate Judges John Facciola, James Francis, Judges William Matthewman, Mac McCoy, Amanda Arnold Sansone and Gary Jones, and retired Florida Circuit Court Judge Ralph Artigliere.

I’m on a panel discussion at 9am ET in a session titled Getting Critical Information From The Tough Locations – Cloud, IOT, Social Media, And Smartphones! with Craig, Kelly, with Judge Sansone.  We’ve already had two planning calls about the session and it should be terrific!

As always, the conference will be conducted in Gainesville, FL on the University of Florida Levin College of Law campus (as well as being livestreamed), with CLE-accredited sessions all day from 8am to 5:30pm ET.  The conference has been approved for 7.5 Continuing Legal Education (CLE) general credits, 2.0 ethics credits and 3.0 technology credits by the Florida Bar for attorneys attending the conference. The Florida Bar has also approved 7.5 civil trial certification credits.    So, this is a great opportunity to get those needed CLE credits!

In addition, E-Discovery CareerFest will precede the 6th Annual E-Discovery Conference for the second straight year on Wednesday, March 28 from 3pm to 5:30pm ET.  And, for the first time, the Law School E-Discovery Core Curriculum Consortium (composed of law professors teaching electronic discovery courses at their respective law schools) will host its first in person workshop focusing on curriculum development on Friday, March 30th from 9am to 12pm ET.

Click here to register for the conference – it’s only $199 for the entire day in person and only $99 for livestream attendance.  And, if you’re a currently enrolled student (in an ABA accredited law school, accredited E-Discovery graduate program or accredited paralegal program), it’s free(!), either in person or livestreamed.  It’s also free if you’re university or college faculty, professional staff, judicial officials, clerks and employees of government bodies and agencies, it’s free(!) for you too.  In any case, it’s a tremendous bargain.

About the only issue I have with the conference is the way they spell “E-Discovery”.  I’ll have to take that up with Bill Hamilton when I see him… :o)

So, what do you think?  Are you going to attend the conference next month?  If not, why not?  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.

“Master” the Love – Today and on February 28th: eDiscovery Trends

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Hope you’re all feeling the love today!  Speaking of feeling the love, we’re only two weeks away from the first event of the year at The Master’s Conference in Dallas!

The Master’s Conference brings together leading experts and professionals from law firms, corporations and the bench to develop strategies, practices and resources for managing eDiscovery and the information life cycle.  This year’s Dallas event covers topics ranging from InfoGov to investigations to machine learning to data discovery to cybersecurity and even blockchain(!), among other things.  Here’s a link to the full agenda.

The event will be held on Wednesday, February 28th at the offices of Thompson & Knight LLP, 1722 Routh St Suite 1500, Dallas, TX 75201.  Registration begins at 8am, with sessions starting right after that, at 8:45am.

CloudNine will be sponsoring the session Investigate This! eDiscovery Is Not Just for Litigation Anymore at 8:45pm that day.  I will be participating in a panel discussion that is moderated by Kevin Clark, Litigation Support Manager at Thompson & Knight (and gracious host for the event) and includes James Lary, Forensic Technology & Discovery Services Manager with Ernst & Young, Jeff Teso, Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal and Dave Rogers, Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Adjunct Professor at SMU Cox School of Business.  We’ll be sharing experiences and providing examples of the use of eDiscovery technology and best practices in support of investigations.  eDiscovery is not just for litigation anymore!

Click here to register for the conference.  If you do so today, you can save up to $200 to attend!  Hurry!

 

Of course, the one I’m really feeling the love for today is my wife Paige – Happy Valentine’s Day, honey!  I love you!  ♥♥♥♥♥

So, what do you think?  Are you going to be in the Dallas area on February 28?  If so, come join us!  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.

Thoughts About Legaltech New York 2018: eDiscovery Trends

We’ve completed another LegalTech New York (LTNY) (a subset of “Legalweek”).  What did attendees at the conference think about this year’s show?  Let’s take a look.

As I’ve done the past couple of years, I reached out to several attendees (some of whom I met with during the show) to get their thoughts and impressions of this year’s show.  As always, these should be taken as their personal opinions and observations regarding the show, not those of their employer or clients.  With that in mind, here is what they had to say:

Shawn Gaines, Director of Product and Community Marketing at Relativity: “Although every conversation I had at the show seemed to hit on the fact that the show itself seemed much cozier than in the past—exemplified by the consolidated expo hall—there was still plenty of energy in the places the show really happens: conference rooms and meeting suites, restaurants and happy hours, and even some local venues.  Beyond that, conversations tended to turn away from typical e-discovery topics to the innovations coming out on top of it—the folks doing more with their existing platforms, developing new applications and integrations to make the best use of what they have.”

Tom O’Connor, Director at Gulf Coast Legal Technology Center: “Attendance was clearly down and the number of exhibitors was spread out over half a dozen local hotels.  Educational content continues to be predominantly infomercials for major sponsors. Main benefit to me was as a B2B forum and that aspect was very good.”

Ralph Losey, E-Discovery Lawyer at Jackson Lewis, P.C. and Author of E-Discovery Team: “LegalTech seems to have outgrown its old home at the Hilton. They should find a bigger space elsewhere.”

Rob Robinson, Data and Legal Discovery Technologist, ComplexDiscovery Blog and CloudNine: “On the eDiscovery front, Legaltech continues to be a galvanizing and polarizing conference at the same time. Galvanizing in the fact of the idealistic yet tangible excitement generated during the event by the sharing and championing of new technologies and approaches to solving eDiscovery challenges. Polarizing in the fact that when viewed through the lens of event participation, the gap between the well-funded and well-connected companies and commentators and those not as well financed or connected appears to be increasing. This increasing gap prevents many great products and points of view from breaking through the noise of paid advertising, sponsorships, and relationships and may be one of the contributing factors to the perceived decrease in status and the actual decrease in provider participation in one of the most successful event franchises in the history of eDiscovery. The benefits of galvanization may continue to outweigh the detriments of polarization, but not by as much as in past years.”

Michele C.S. Lange, Freelance writer and attorney: “If you left Legalweek and learned nothing about machine learning, deep learning or supervised learning, you attended some other random conference. This was the year to dig deep on AI.”

Jason R. Baron, Of Counsel at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP: “I was heartened to see “AI” being discussed everywhere one travelled at Legaltech this year.  The movement toward embracing smarter analytics in e-discovery (predictive coding, TAR, etc.) now looks to be a “feature” of a more comprehensive discussion we are engaged in as to how the law should embrace all manner of artificial intelligence in connection with the Internet of Things and beyond.    I also appreciated more sophisticated attention being paid to ethical aspects of the coming AI revolution, in sessions such as the one moderated by Martin Tully and including Ralph Losey and Shannon Kirk discussing E-Discovery in the Year 2048: What the Future Holds.  In my mind, however, we need not wait until 2048 to discuss whether public and private sector institutions should be creating algorithmic review boards (similar to existing IRBs for human subjects) to review potential bias and discrimination in the use of algorithmic inputs, or other novel issues involving big data aggregation and surveillance.  The future is coming faster than anyone in the “ESI” universe of ediscovery ever imagined, as this year at Legaltech made abundantly clear.

David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel & Legal Education Director at Relativity: “Not surprisingly, just about every poll will put “artificial intelligence” at the top of the Legalweek 18 takeaway list, but it was a different conversation this time. The educational sessions did a good job of taking the discussions beyond the HAL 9000 nightmare of the robots taking all jobs, bitcoins, and lives as we know them. There were efforts made to define artificial intelligence—not unlike those erstwhile attempts to define “information governance”—but there were also practical privacy analyses, such as the HIPAA considerations of robots dispensing medications. Overall, the conversation went beyond fear and loathing to embracing and regulating.”

Craig Ball, eDiscovery Thought Leader and Author of Ball in Your Court blog: “LegalTech is like a party that keeps going long after the host has gone to bed.  Its deep value lies in the conversations in the halls, balls and barroom stalls of Midtown West. “What are you working on?”  “Have you heard about…?”  “We bought their product and it was a disaster/delight.”  The Hilton’s still the hub, but the action’s in its orbit.  New York supplies the juice.”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

As for my own thoughts, the conference seemed smaller yet again this year, especially in the exhibit hall.  One colleague pointed out to me that the number of exhibitors (not companies that were listed as “LegalCIO” or “Business of Law” participants) was down again this year.  Industry consolidation or lack of willingness of providers to participate or both?  You decide.  As for the sessions, I attended a handful in between meetings and they were high quality once again.  I heard some raise concerns that the sessions were mere vendor infomercials, but I didn’t see that in the ones I attended – they were good quality with knowledgeable panelists.  AI and GDPR were the topics of the year, and rightly so.

I think ALM needs to (finally) consider moving Legaltech to a new venue as much of the activity is conducted in suites in hotels like the London and Warwick.  Rob used the terms “galvanizing” and “polarizing” above and I think those terms wonderfully describe the state of the conference today.  A lot of people rarely or never make it over to the exhibit hall or the sessions.  A venue that includes plenty of breakout rooms onsite would – if the breakout rooms were priced reasonably – keep all attendees plugged into the heart of the conference instead of disbursed.  And, it could keep those vendors who currently don’t participate engaged at some level so that a $2,500 attendance fee for non-participating vendors wouldn’t be necessary.  Creative thinking is needed for Legaltech to remain among the most important conferences each year.

So, what do you think?  Did you attend this year’s Legaltech?  If so, what did you think of the conference?  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.

Do You Know How Many eDiscovery Blogs There Are? Maybe More Than You Think: eDiscovery Trends

If you want to go to one place to find as many as 60 good eDiscovery blogs, Feedspot has created a list of the Top 60 eDiscovery Blogs and Websites For eDiscovery Professionals.

According to their listing here, these are the “Best eDiscovery blogs from thousands of top eDiscovery blogs in our index using search and social metrics.”  Data regarding the blogs “will be refreshed once a week.”

Feedspot has ranked the blogs based on following criteria:

  • Google reputation and Google search ranking
  • Influence and popularity on Facebook, twitter and other social media sites
  • Quality and consistency of posts.
  • Feedspot’s editorial team and expert review

According to those criteria, these are the top 10 blogs:

  1. CloudNine – eDiscoveryDaily
  2. KLDiscovery | The Ediscovery Blog
  3. Complex Discovery
  4. E-Discovery Team
  5. Ball in your Court | Musings on e-discovery & forensics
  6. eDisclosure Information Project
  7. eDiscovery Journal
  8. D4: eDiscovery and Data Management Blog
  9. Bow Tie Law – Knotty Issues of eDiscovery
  10. Casepoint | Full-strength eDiscovery platform

That’s right, eDiscovery Daily is ranked the top blog by Feedspot!  We’re honored and grateful for the recognition.  Feedspot also gave all of the blogs a nice little badge that we can display on our site to reflect their recognition (which is displayed at the top of this post).

For each blog, Feedspot identifies the number of Facebook fans (we have 97), Twitter followers (5,597) and Alexa rank (1,496,973 – there’s a lot of blogs out there, clearly).  The site also indicates the Frequency of posts and how long the blog has been around (for us, that’s since Sept 2010).

As someone who writes a daily blog, I have tremendous respect for all of the blogs on this list and couldn’t write this one without referencing some of the great stories and info in these other blogs.  There’s a lot of great information about eDiscovery on these blogs!

So, what do you think?  How many of these blogs do you read?  Besides ours, of course!  :o)  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.