Our Insights on eDiscovery

On the surface, it may seem easy enough to redact a document during eDiscovery review to obscure confidential or privileged information. All you need to do is draw a black box over the affected text, right? Not necessarily. There’s a lot more to consider in order to ensure that you don’t inadvertently produce information that was intended to be redacted. Here are a few things to consider to avoid getting “burned by redaction failures.

We’ve covered three rounds of the quarterly eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey created by Rob Robinson and conducted on his terrific Complex Discovery site. Last time, sponsorship from ACEDS and promotion from EDRM, LTPI, Masters Conference, and Women in eDiscovery helped increase the number of respondents dramatically (more than the first two surveys combined). Now, it’s time for the Fall 2016 Survey to complete the cycle!

How do you like them apples? After they were the subject of much scrutiny five years ago regarding their attempt to trademark “predictive coding” (only to eventually abandon it), Recommind (now OpenText after they were acquired) is now challenging the trademark of “continuous active learning” and its acronym, “CAL”.

Today’s thought leader is Mary Mack. Mary is ACEDS’ executive director and an eDiscovery pioneer. She is known for her skills in relationship and community building as well as for the depth of her eDiscovery knowledge. 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 eDiscovery. She is the co-editor of the Thomson Reuters West treatise, eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel.

When it comes to effective records management of your organization’s data, many people think that the data has to be moved to a centralized location, such as a server or other file share, to be managed effectively. But, you can also effectively manage that data where it resides with an In-Place Records Management solution.

When providing searching assistance to my clients and reviewing their proposed list of search terms, one of the considerations I use for evaluating those terms is whether they contain any potential “noise” words that might affect their search results. Noise words (also known as stop words) are words – such as “to”, “or”, “not”, etc. – which are so common that they are not considered useful in searches.

OK, I may have taken a couple of shots at Florida last Thursday over their ballot issues in elections over the years. However, Florida deserves credit in being the first state to require technology CLE for lawyers.

Back in May, I was excited and honored to moderate an enjoyable panel session in Chicago at The Masters Conference event there. Then, we did it again in July in New York City. Now, we’re doing it again later this month, this time in our nation’s capital, Washington DC!