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Information Governance

Laura Zubulake, Author of “Zubulake's e-Discovery” – eDiscovery Trends

This is the fifth of the 2013 LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and generally asked each of them the following questions:

  1. What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?
  2. If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Laura Zubulake.  Laura worked on Wall Street for 20 years in institutional equity departments and, in 1991, authored the book The Complete Guide to Convertible Securities Worldwide. She was the plaintiff in the Zubulake vs. UBS Warburg case, which resulted in several landmark opinions related to eDiscovery and counsel’s obligations for the preservation of electronically stored information. The December 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were influenced, in part, by the Zubulake case. Last year, Laura published a book titled Zubulake’s e-Discovery: The Untold Story of my Quest for Justice, previously discussed on this blog here and she speaks professionally about eDiscovery topics and her experiences related to the case.

What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?

{Interviewed the second day of the show}  The crowd is similar in size to last year’s conference.  As always, there is that buzz of activity. There is a diversity of speakers and panels.  The Judge’s panels should be informative as usual,  Ted Olsen’s keynote was an interesting and different introduction to the conference.  I’m also looking forward to the Thursday Closing Plenary Address on cyber security by Mary Galligan from the FBI.  As far as trends are concerned, based on the agenda it is clear that information governance is becoming more of an important topic.  Cyber security is also more of a focus.    Next year, I think cyber security, information governance, and big data will continue to be trends.  I think that by next year, predictive coding will be less of a hot topic.

Speaking of predictive coding, if last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?

At this point, I think that predictive coding has moved along the learning curve. Personally, I like to use the word algorithms with regard to predictive coding.  For years, algorithms have been used in government, law enforcement, and Wall Street.  It is not a new concept.  I think there will be an increasing acceptance of using them.  A key to acceptance will be to get cases where both parties agree to use algorithms voluntarily (instead of being forced to use them) and both sides are comfortable with the results.

As for the next big thing, as I said earlier,  there will probably be increased attention on information governance.  As the eDiscovery industry matures, information governance will become more of a focus for corporations.  They will realize that, while they have legal obligations (with regard to electronic information), they also need to proactively manage that information. This will not only mitigate costs and risk but also leverage that information for business purposes.  So far, I have found the panel discussions regarding information governance to be most interesting.

What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

My goal this past year was to publish my book.  Reviews have been  good and I’m very thankful for that – especially given that I worked on it for several years.  The feedback has been rewarding in two aspects.  First, those in the eDiscovery industry are appreciating the book, because they are getting the background story to the making of the precedents.  Second, and even more rewarding to me personally, are reactions from readers who are not in the in the industry and not familiar with eDiscovery.  They appreciate the human-interest side of the story.  There are two stories in the book.  The broader audience finds the legal story interesting, but finds the human-interest story compelling.  I am also encouraged that readers are recognizing my story is really more about information governance than eDiscovery.  It was my understanding of the value of information and desire to search for it that resulted in the eDiscovery opinions.  As I state in my book, Zubulake I was the most important opinion because it gave me the opportunity to search for information.

Going forward, I will continue to market the book, plan events to market it and work towards getting more reviews in what I would call the broader media, not just in eDiscovery or legal media outlets.  Another one of my goals for this year and next year is to get back into the workforce in the area of information governance.  I think my Wall Street background and eDiscovery experiences are a perfect combination for information governance.  I also hope to use my book as a platform for my job search.

Thanks, Laura, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

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

Tom Gelbmann of Gelbmann & Associates, LLC – eDiscovery Trends

This is the third of the 2013 LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and generally asked each of them the following questions:

  1. What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?
  2. If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Tom Gelbmann. Tom is Principal of Gelbmann & Associates, LLC.  Since 1993, Gelbmann & Associates, LLC has advised law firms and Corporate Law Departments to realize the full benefit of their investments in Information Technology.  Tom has also been co-author of the leading survey on the electronic discovery market, The Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey; in 2011 he and George Socha converted the Survey into Apersee, an online system for selecting eDiscovery providers and their offerings.  In 2005, he and George Socha launched the Electronic Discovery Reference Model project to establish standards within the eDiscovery industry – today, the EDRM model has become a standard in the industry for the eDiscovery life cycle.

What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?

{Interviewed the first morning of LegalTech}  The most notable trend I have seen to lead up to LegalTech is the rush to jump on the computer assisted review bandwagon.  There are several sessions here at the show related to computer assisted review.  In addition, many in the industry seem to have a tool now some are promoting it as an “easy” button.  There is no “easy” button and, if I can mention a plug for EDRM, that’s one of the things the Search group was concerned with, so the group published the Computer Assisted Review Reference Model (CARRM) (our blog post about CARRM here).

To help people understand what computer assisted review is all about: it’s great technology and, if well used, it can really deliver great results, save time and save money, but it has to be understood it’s a tool.  It’s not a substitute for a process.  The good news is the technology is helping and, as I have been seeing for years, the more technology is intelligently used, the more you can start to bend the cost curve down for electronic discovery.  So, what I think it has started to do and will continue to do is level off those costs on the right hand side of the model.

If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?

I think one of the “next big things” which has already started is the whole left side of the model which I would characterize as information governance.  Information governance is on the rise and a lot of people in the industry believe that information governance today might be where electronic discovery was in about 2005 or 2006.  We need a lot of understanding, standards and education on effective approaches to information governance because that’s really where the problems are.  There are significant expenditures by organizations trying to work with too much data and not being able to find their data.  Associated with that, will be technology that will help and I also anticipate a significant increase in consulting services to help organizations develop effective policies and procedures.  The consulting organizations that can get it right and communicate it effectively will be able to capitalize on this aspect of the market.  Related to that, from a preservation standpoint, we have been seeing more software tools to help with litigation hold as more organizations get serious about preservation.

Another big trend is education.  EDRM is involved with the programs at Bryan University and the University of Florida (Bill Hamilton deserves a lot of credit for what is happening there).  I think you are going to see that continue to expand as more universities and educational facilities will be providing quality programs in the area of electronic discovery and perhaps information governance along the way.

The last trend I want to mention is a greater focus on marketing.  From a provider’s standpoint, it seems that there has been a flood of announcements about organizations that have hired a new marketing director, either overall for a specific region (west coast, east coast, South America, etc.).  Marketing is really expanding in the community, so it seems that providers are realizing they really have to intelligently go after business.  I don’t believe we saw that level of activity even two or three years ago.

What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

With regard to EDRM, we had a very productive mid-year meeting where we asked our participants to help us plan for the future of EDRM.  As a result, we came up with several changes we are immediately implementing. One change is that projects are going to be much smaller and shorter duration with as few as one to five people working on a particular item to get it done and get it out to the community more quickly for feedback.  One example of that which we discussed above is CARRM.  We just announced another project yesterday which was the Talent Task Matrix (our blog post about it here).  We already have 91 downloads of the diagram and 87 downloads of the spreadsheet in less than a day. The matrix was very good work done by a very small group of EDRM folks.  We also dropped the prices for EDRM participation and there are also going to be additional changes in terms of sponsorships and advertising, so we are changing as we are gearing up for our 10th year.

Also, we’re very excited about the additions we have made to Apersee in the last six months.  One addition is the calendar which we believe is the most comprehensive calendar around for eDiscovery events.  If it is happening in the eDiscovery world globally, it’s probably on the Apersee calendar.  For conferences and webinars, the participating organizations will be listed, with a link back to their profile within Apersee.  We are also tracking press releases related to eDiscovery, enabling users to view press releases chronologically and also see the press releases associated within organization to see what they have said about themselves through their press releases.  These are examples of what Apersee is doing to build the comprehensive view of eDiscovery organizations to show what is happening, what they are doing and what services and products they offer.

Thanks, Tom, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

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

Ray Zwiefelhofer of World Software (Worldox) – eDiscovery Trends

This is the second of the 2013 LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and generally asked each of them the following questions:

  1. What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?
  2. If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Ray Zwiefelhofer of World Software (Worldox).  Ray has over twenty years of experience within the technology and legal services market, offering professional, consulting, technology management and product solutions with an emphasis on working with AMLAW 250 & Fortune 500 organizations.  He has founded and served in President/CEO/CIO positions at software startups and as a CTO at a Fortune 500 company.  Prior to joining World Software, Ray was the Founder/CEO of nQueue a global cost recovery company where he patented and spearheaded the change from a hardware-based to software-based cost recovery model. Ray has also worked previously at include the Thomas Kinkade Network, Bowne, Imagineer, Equitrac and Diebold.

What are your general observations about LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends?

We felt the show has been terrific.  The traffic has appeared to be of higher quality than normal with many clients wanting a private demo and follow-up. Very typically, a post-review from prior shows included comments of the masses that just swung by to grab a pen or giveaway.  This year’s LegalTech attendees appear to be a more serious decision making audience.  The trends we saw continually popping up during the show included information governance, the cloud and big data.

If last year’s “next big thing” was the emergence of predictive coding, what do you feel is this year’s “next big thing”?

I think the first “next big thing” will be the continued race for mobility and platform flexibility such as cloud computing. Even the largest vendors at the show announced their focus on more cloud computing initiatives. I believe over the coming years, if this trend continues at the pace it has been keeping, there will be less talk about the cloud because prospects will just assume a vendor’s company has a cloud product.  It will be standard, like back when software was ‘network capable.’  Having spent 25 years in this market, I never thought we would see this heavy motivation to move to ‘hosted computing’, but hey, it’s here, so we must embrace it or get left behind!

What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

At World Software, we continue to fulfill our vision of anywhere anytime document access, on the platform of our clients’ choice.  I believe long-gone is the day when we as vendors can dictate what the client needs to run our products.  At LegalTech NY, we launched our new GX3 cloud product which completes our suite of offerings, delivering the same technology as our client-server based product (Worldox GX3 Professional,) and our ‘on-premise’ cloud solution (GX3 enterprise) which sits behind the firm’s firewall on their servers. GX3 Cloud is hosted in our data center and is offered for a low monthly fee.

Thanks, Ray, for participating in the interview!

And to the readers, as always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily 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 IDC, Big Data is Only Getting Bigger – eDiscovery Trends

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), big data is only getting bigger.  In the publication IDC iView “Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East,” (sponsored by EMC), which is excerpted here, the “digital universe” is growing even faster than we thought.

As the report notes: “at the midpoint of a longitudinal study starting with data collected in 2005 and extending to 2020, our analysis shows a continuously expanding, increasingly complex, and ever more interesting digital universe.”  IDC’s sixth annual study of the digital universe contains some interesting findings, including:

  • From 2005 to 2020, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes (more than 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman, and child in 2020). From now until 2020, the digital universe will about double every two years.
  • The investment in spending on IT hardware, software, services, telecommunications and staff that could be considered the “infrastructure” of the digital universe and telecommunications will grow by 40% between 2012 and 2020. As a result, the investment per gigabyte (GB) during that same period will drop from $2.00 to $0.20. Of course, investment in targeted areas like storage management, security, big data, and cloud computing will grow considerably faster.
  • A majority of the information in the digital universe, 68% in 2012, is created and consumed by consumers — watching digital TV, interacting with social media, sending camera phone images and videos between devices and around the Internet, and so on. Yet enterprises have liability or responsibility for nearly 80% of the information in the digital universe.
  • Only a tiny fraction of the digital universe has been explored for analytic value. IDC estimates that by 2020, as much as 33% of the digital universe will contain information that might be valuable if analyzed.
  • By 2020, nearly 40% of the information in the digital universe will be “touched” by cloud computing providers — meaning that a byte will be stored or processed in a cloud somewhere in its journey from originator to disposal.
  • The first Digital Universe Study was published in 2007.  At that time, IDC’s forecast for the digital universe in 2010 was 988 exabytes (in 2002, there were 5 exabytes in the world, representing an estimated growth of 19,760% in eight years).  Based on actuals, it was later revised to 1,227 exabytes (an actual growth of 24,540% in eight years).  So far, data is growing even faster than anticipated.

The report excerpt breaks out several graphs to illustrate where the digital universe is now and where it’s headed, showing how, as IT costs rise, the costs per GB will fall considerably and also showing the “geography” of the digital universe, with the US currently accounting for 32% of the digital universe.  According to IDC, the share of the digital universe attributable to emerging markets is up to 36% in 2012 and is expected to be 62% by 2020.

Obviously, this has considerable eDiscovery ramifications as data within organizations will continue to grow exponentially and a combination of good information governance programs and effective retrieval technology will be even more vital to keep eDiscovery manageable and costs in check.

So, what do you think?  Do you have a plan in place to manage exponential data growth?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

How Are You Handling Defensible Deletion? – eDiscovery Best Practices

According to the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC), information volume doubles every 18-24 months and 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years.  So, many organizations are drowning in electronically stored information (ESI) and costs associated with managing that ESI for eDiscovery are continuing to rise.  An effective plan for information governance that includes defensible deletion of ESI is an effective way of keeping that ESI from overwhelming your organization.  But, what percentage of organizations is defensibly deleting data?  A new survey from eDJGroup is attempting to find out.

Defensible deletion of ESI that has little or no business value and is not subject to legal hold is a good business practice that is protected through Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (commonly known as the “safe harbor” rule) which states:

Failure to Provide Electronically Stored Information. Absent exceptional circumstances, a court may not impose sanctions under these rules on a party for failing to provide electronically stored information lost as a result of the routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system.

Barry Murphy’s article (Defensible Deletion Gaining Steam) on eDiscovery Journal discusses the eDJGroup survey and provides some interim results to two of the questions asked:

  1. Do you believe defensible deletion of information is necessary in order to manage growing volumes of digital information?: As of the article date on December 4, an overwhelming 93.0% of all respondents have said ‘yes’, 2.3% have said ‘no’ and 4.7% have said ‘don’t know / unsure’.  Frankly, I’m surprised that anybody doesn’t believe that defensible deletion is necessary!
  2. Does your organization currently defensibly delete information?: As of the article date on December 4, 14.0% of all respondents have said ‘yes, for all systems’, 54.7% have said ‘yes, in some systems’, 16.3% have said ‘no’ and 15.1% have said ‘don’t know’.  That means that over 2/3 of respondents so far (68.7%) defensibly delete information in at least some systems.

As of the article date, there had been 86 respondents.  But, the survey is not over!  You can take the survey here and contribute to the results.  Murphy says the ‘survey will close later this month, so be sure to take it now’, but doesn’t provide a specific date that it closes (one would hope it would be at the end of the month to be as inclusive as possible).  Nonetheless, ‘all respondents will get a summary of the results and have a chance to win a $250 gift card’, so it’s worthwhile to participate.

So, what do you think?  Does your organization have an information governance plan that includes defensible deletion of data?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

ARMA/Forrester Survey: Only One in Eight Records Managers Trusts Their ESI – eDiscovery Trends

According to the Forrester Research and ARMA International Records Management Online Survey, Q3 2012, only 12 percent of records managers are “very confident” that, if challenged, their organization could demonstrate that their electronically stored information (ESI) is “accurate, accessible, complete and trustworthy”.  That’s less than one in eight.

The report, co-authored by ARMA and Forrester Research, contains the results of a survey of 354 records managers.

Some of the less than optimistic comments from the report include: “Records managers report abysmally low e-discovery confidence…This bleak data point represents an even lower e-discovery confidence rate than captured in past surveys…[S]urvey data show that integrated legal hold – a critical component needed for successful defensible disposition – is simply missing in organizations.”

And this: “Organizations aren’t sure of the business value or legal obligations to preserve content so they simply continue to accumulate digital debris, slowing down overtaxed systems, adding to storage costs, and posing potential additional litigation and investigation burdens over time.”

Some of the reasons cited as obstacles to improved records management include:

  • Poor systems integration – 74 percent of respondents;
  • Inadequate budget – 73 percent;
  • Lack of experienced staff – 64 percent;
  • Outdated policies or procedures – 55 percent; and
  • Lack of clear leadership – 54 percent.

So, what are organizations doing to address the obstacles?  Here are some indications:

  • 40 percent of survey respondents expect that their organization’s overall records management spending will increase at least 5% from 2012 to 2013;
  • 71 percent currently have implementation plans underway, or plans to implement records management technology within the next year;
  • 81 percent consider an improvement in records management policy consistency an important objective for their organization.

A copy of the report is available here from Forrester Research for $499.

Since, according to the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC), information volume doubles every 18-24 months, you would think organizations would be making greater strides in implementing information governance programs.  Of course, many information governance industry initiatives are still in relative infancy, including the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) Project of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), which was started a mere two years ago (click here for information on their newest version).  It appears that organizations still have a long way to go to get their data under control.

So, what do you think?  What, if any, records management obstacles are your organization facing?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

Does This Scare You? – eDiscovery Horrors!

Today is Halloween.  While we could try to “scare” you with the traditional “frights”, we’re an eDiscovery blog, so every year we try to “scare” you in a different way instead.  Does this scare you?

The defendant had been previously sanctioned $500,000 ($475,000 to the plaintiff and $25,000 to the court) and held in contempt of court by the magistrate judge for spoliation, who also recommended an adverse inference instruction be issued at trial.  The defendant appealed to the district court, where Minnesota District Judge John Tunheim increased the award to the plaintiff to $600,000.  Oops!

What about this?

Even though the litigation hold letter from April 2008 was sent to the primary custodians, at least one principal was determined to have actively deleted relevant emails. Additionally, the plaintiffs made no effort to suspend the automatic destruction policy of emails, so emails that were deleted could not be recovered.  Ultimately, the court found that 9 of 14 key custodians had deleted relevant documents. After the defendants raised its spoliation concerns with the court, the plaintiffs continued to delete relevant information, including decommissioning and discarding an email server without preserving any of the relevant ESI.  As a result, the New York Supreme Court imposed the severest of sanctions against the plaintiffs for spoliation of evidence – dismissal of their $20 million case.

Or this?

For most organizations, information volume doubles every 18-24 months and 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years. In a typical company in 2011, storing that data consumed about 10% of the IT budget. At a growth rate of 40% (even as storage unit costs decline), storing this data will consume over 20% of the typical IT budget by 2014.

How about this?

There “was stunned silence by all attorneys in the court room after that order. It looks like neither side saw it coming.”

Or maybe this?

If you have deleted any of your photos from Facebook in the past three years, you may be surprised to find that they are probably still on the company’s servers.

Scary, huh?  If the possibility of sanctions, exponential data growth and judges ordering parties to perform predictive coding keep you awake at night, then the folks at eDiscovery Daily will do our best to provide useful information and best practices to enable you to relax and sleep soundly, even on Halloween!

Then again, if the expense, difficulty and risk of processing and loading up to 100 GB of data into an eDiscovery review application that you’ve never used before terrifies you, maybe you should check this out.

Of course, if you seriously want to get into the spirit of Halloween, click here.  This will really terrify you!

Those of you who are really mortified that the next post in Jane Gennarelli’s “Litigation 101” series won’t run this week, fear not – it will run tomorrow.

What do you think?  Is there a particular eDiscovery issue that scares you?  Please share your comments and let us know if you’d like more information on a particular topic.

Happy Halloween!

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

EDRM Announces Several Updates at Mid-Year Meeting – eDiscovery Trends

Last week, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) conducted its mid-year meeting to enable the working groups to meet and further accomplishments in each of the teams for the year.  Having attended several of these meetings in the past, I’ve always found them to usually yield significant progress within the working groups, as well as providing a great opportunity for eDiscovery professionals to get together and talk shop.  Based on the results of the meeting, EDRM issued an announcement with updates from several of their more active projects.

Here are the updates:

  • Data Set: The Data Set project announced the launch of its new file upload utility. “The upload utility will allow us to develop a modern data set that more accurately represents the type of files that are commonly encountered in data processing,” said Eric Robi of Elluma Discovery, co-chair of the project with Michael Lappin of NUIX. The Data Set project also announced a soon-to-be-published “million file dataset” and an upcoming redacted version of the Enron data set, previously described on this blog here.
  • Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM): The IGRM team announced that its updated model (IGRM v3) was recently published and presented at ARMA International’s 57th Annual Conference & Expo and the IAPP Privacy Academy 2012. As discussed on this blog just a couple of weeks ago, the updated version adds privacy and security as key stakeholders in the model.
  • Jobs: The Jobs project continued development of the EDRM RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) Matrix, a tool designed to help hiring managers better understand the responsibilities associated with common e-discovery roles. RACI maps responsibilities to the EDRM framework so e-discovery duties associated can be assigned to the appropriate parties.
  • Metrics: The Metrics project team refined the EDRM Metrics database, an anonymous set of e-discovery processing metrics derived from actual matters, which will include a CSV upload function to make it easier for vendors and law firms to anonymously submit data to the system.  Having worked on the early stages of this project, my “hats off” to the team for the additional accomplishments.
  • Search: The Search group announced that its EDRM Computer Assisted Review Reference Model (CARRM) soon will be available for public comment. The goal of CARRM is to demystify the predictive coding process and to allow for a common communication platform between vendors and end-users at each phase of the CAR process and it will be interesting to see the document that emerges from these efforts.

EDRM meets in person twice a year, in May for the annual meeting and October for the mid-year meeting, with regular working group phone calls scheduled throughout the year to keep the projects progressing.  The next in person meeting is next year’s annual meeting, currently scheduled for May 7 thru 9, 2013.  For more information about EDRM, click here.  For information on joining EDRM, including fee information for participation, click here.

So, what do you think?  Have you been following the activity of EDRM?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

EDRM Announces Version 3 of the IGRM for Information Governance – eDiscovery Trends

This week, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project, through its Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) Project, announced today the release of version 3.0 of the IGRM.  As their press release notes, “The updated model now includes privacy and security as primary functions and stakeholders in the effective governance of information. This release of the IGRM reflects broad industry support and collaboration across the expert communities of ARMA International and CGOC (Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council).”

The importance of information governance to the eDiscovery process is clear – when organizations do not have a clear plan for managing their information and defensibly disposing of expired information at the right time, costs for managing that information to respond to discovery requests soar.  The IGRM Project’s mission is to “provide a common, practical framework enabling organizations to establish information governance programs that more effectively deal with the rising volume and diversity of information and the risks, costs, and complications this presents”.  Information Governance is an organization-wide process, affecting Legal, Records, IT and Business organizations within the organization.

The IGRM project was started a mere two years ago, in 2010.  Why does the IGRM exist?  Their early survey of corporate practitioners, conducted jointly with the CGOC, makes it clear:

  • 100% of respondents stated that defensible disposal was the primary purpose of information governance;
  • 66% of IT and 50% of RIM (records management) respondents said their current responsibility model for information governance was ineffective; and
  • 80% of respondents across Legal, IT, and RIM said they had little or very weak linkage between legal obligations for information/data and records management.

As the latest press release notes, “IGRM v3.0 now incorporates Privacy and Security as key stakeholders, reflecting the increasing importance of Privacy and Security duties and the efficiencies organizations can achieve when privacy and security efforts are more holistically integrated with other essential governance practices and programs.”  The diagram above reflects the change – there is a new stakeholder group in blue within the diagram, representing Privacy & Security.

As for other details detailing the IGRM v3.0 update, a white paper is available on the EDRM site (with a link available to download a PDF of the white paper).

EDRM (via the IGRM project) and CGOC have been busy on the Information Governance front this year, as noted by these past stories on our blog here, here and here.  Kudos to all involved in these efforts!

So, what do you think?  Where does your organization stand with regard to information governance efforts?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

eDiscovery Daily is Two Years Old Today!
 

It’s hard to believe that it has been two years ago today since we launched the eDiscoveryDaily blog.  Now that we’ve hit the “terrible twos”, is the blog going to start going off on rants about various eDiscovery topics, like Will McAvoy in The Newsroom?   Maybe.  Or maybe not.  Wouldn’t that be fun!

As we noted when recently acknowledging our 500th post, we have seen traffic on our site (from our first three months of existence to our most recent three months) grow an amazing 442%!  Our subscriber base has nearly doubled in the last year alone!  We now have nearly seven times the visitors to the site as we did when we first started.  We continue to appreciate the interest you’ve shown in the topics and will do our best to continue to provide interesting and useful eDiscovery news and analysis.  That’s what this blog is all about.  And, in each post, we like to ask for you to “please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic”, so we encourage you to do so to make this blog even more useful.

We also want to thank the blogs and publications that have linked to our posts and raised our public awareness, including Pinhawk, The Electronic Discovery Reading Room, Unfiltered Orange, Litigation Support Blog.com, Litigation Support Technology & News, Ride the Lightning, InfoGovernance Engagement Area, Learn About E-Discovery, Alltop, Law.com, Justia Blawg Search, Atkinson-Baker (depo.com), ABA Journal, Complex Discovery, Next Generation eDiscovery Law & Tech Blog and any other publication that has picked up at least one of our posts for reference (sorry if I missed any!).  We really appreciate it!

We like to take a look back every six months at some of the important stories and topics during that time.  So, here are some posts over the last six months you may have missed.  Enjoy!

We talked about best practices for issuing litigation holds and how issuing the litigation hold is just the beginning.

By the way, did you know that if you deleted a photo on Facebook three years ago, it may still be online?

We discussed states (Delaware, Pennsylvania and Florida) that have implemented new rules for eDiscovery in the past few months.

We talked about how to achieve success as a non-attorney in a law firm, providing quality eDiscovery services to your internal “clients” and how to be an eDiscovery consultant, and not just an order taker, for your clients.

We warned you that stop words can stop your searches from being effective, talked about how important it is to test your searches before the meet and confer and discussed the importance of the first 7 to 10 days once litigation hits in addressing eDiscovery issues.

We told you that, sometimes, you may need to collect from custodians that aren’t there, differentiated between quality assurance and quality control and discussed the importance of making sure that file counts add up to what was collected (with an example, no less).

By the way, did you know the number of pages in a gigabyte can vary widely and the same exact content in different file formats can vary by as much as 16 to 20 times in size?

We provided a book review on Zubulake’s e-Discovery and then interviewed the author, Laura Zubulake, as well.

BTW, eDiscovery Daily has had 150 posts related to eDiscovery Case Law since the blog began.  Fifty of them have been in the last six months.

P.S. – We still haven't missed a business day yet without a post.  Yes, we are crazy.

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