Careers

ILTA Women in eDiscovery Interviews Show the Impact Women Make on our Profession: eDiscovery Trends

We’re just a little over a month away from ILTACON 2018, one of the most important conferences every year in the legal technology world.  This year’s conference is at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center at National Harbor, MD.  CloudNine will be exhibiting at the conference and I will be speaking at the conference!  More on that to come later.  But, a current series on the ILTA blog about Women in eDiscovery shows that ILTA is about a lot more than the annual ILTACON conference.

Phil Weldon, a content coordinating volunteer for ILTA, has published a series of Women in eDiscovery interviews on the ILTA blog.  As you probably know, Women in eDiscovery™ (“WiE”) is a nonprofit organization focused on providing women with legal technology education, networking and leadership opportunities.  As you may recall, CloudNine participated in a WiE event last year at South Texas College of Law and will again this year in September (more on that to come too).  Anyway, as Phil puts it:

“In May of 2018, my ILTA colleague Chandra Foreman was able to put me in touch with the Chicago Chapter Board of Women in eDiscovery. As a non-profit organization, WiE holds monthly meetings for legal professional women with a primary focus on education and networking. They also collaborate, fundraise, and mentor. I enjoyed taking the interviews and am sincerely excited to share them with the ILTA community. ‘Women can empower other women’ as Jennifer Roe so eloquently put. I hope you find these interviews as fun and insightful as I did.”

So far, Phil has interviewed Jennifer Roe (Director of the WiE Chicago Chapter), Lekecia Barclay (Litigation Support Specialist at the Securities & Exchange Commission), Ann M. Eisenreich (Division Director at Beacon Hill Legal), Amy Juers (CEO at Edge Marketing) and Diandra Ritchie (Senior Specialist – EEO, Labor & Employee Relations at City Colleges of Chicago).  Great series so far!  Hopefully, I didn’t miss any; if so, I apologize!

Regardless, I always enjoy hearing about other professionals in our industry, how they got started and what they enjoy most about the work they do.  A few years ago, my (then) blog colleague Jane Gennarelli did a series of eDiscovery Professional Profiles (click here to check them out – the first 16 posts in response to the linked search are the profiles that she did).  Maybe we’ll have to kick off a new series!  I’m inspired!

So, what do you think?  Do you know an eDiscovery professional that deserves to be profiled?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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

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

Here’s a Conference that Can Be a SOLID Boost to Your Career: eDiscovery Best Practices

Actually, it’s not a “conference” so much as it’s a “summit” – the Summit On Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID).  SOLID is an interactive exchange of ideas by doers, innovators and disruptors in the business of law. Speakers and participants will inform, instruct and inspire one another to design and apply solutions that will elevate and accelerate their careers from ‘now’ to ‘next’.  The SOLID West 2018 summit is coming up this month in San Francisco on Thursday, March 15, 2018 (here’s a link to the agenda for the SOLID West summit).

Last week, I spoke with David Cowen, President and Managing Director of The Cowen Group, (which, as many of you know, is a staffing and recruiting firm focused on eDiscovery, Litigation Support, Privacy, Security and Information Governance professionals) and organizer of the SOLID summit program and asked him how SOLID summits are different from other conferences:

“It’s a summit series effecting change at the individual professional level as opposed to the industrial level.  In these summits, individuals can come together and experience a series of TED talks, then connect with peers and colleagues through a series of table talks and then a town hall”, David said.  “These aren’t discussions about what people are thinking and predicting will happen, they are discussions about what people are doing within their organizations today.  There’s no pontification, there’s no “what if”.  It’s all experiential knowledge being shared – what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, why they did it this way and lessons learned.  Focused on the business use case of the technology and what it can do to move your career forward and your business forward.  And, that’s a real differentiator from conferences where people are talking about the next big idea.”

“This ‘TED talk, table talk, town hall’ approach, which is facilitated by the experienced 55 faculty members, helps create a hub of conversation around evolving trends and use cases in the business of law today.  By the ‘business of law’, I mean that critical intersection between next gen legal technology (which includes AI and machine learning, among other technologies) and the impact that’s having on the business of law and the careers of professionals that are trying to innovate and get from ‘now’ to ‘next’.  At the end of each summit, each participant at SOLID gets a 90 day action plan to fill out to identify what each of them will do in the next 90 days to take action on what they just learned, followed up by six working groups conducting ten virtual calls over a six month period (and completing two work product deliverables) to keep enforcing ‘stickiness’ and ‘accountability’.  If you want to go to a ‘mini MBA program’, this is the place to be.”

David also indicated that, in addition to the two SOLID summits each year in San Francisco and New York (and perhaps eventually regional summits as well), they’re also planning to roll out a breakfast workshop series on how to get from ‘now’ to ‘next’ in your career.  As David told me, “It will be a two hour ‘boot camp’ that we’ll conduct in ten cities in the spring, summer and fall of 2018 focused on what it takes to be successful in the business of law.  The idea is that if you don’t take an interest in your own career development and advancement, you’re going to be gone.  And, we want to help people get from ‘gone’ to ‘good’ to ‘golden’.

Golden, indeed!  The SOLID summit series began with the first summit last fall in New York and will return to New York for SOLID East 2018 on September 13 and 14.  To register for the SOLID West 2018 summit (there’s still time!), click here.  This summit is SOLID as a rock!

CloudNine is excited to be a sponsor and participant in the SOLID summit series and my colleague, Julia Romero Peter, will be at the SOLID West summit later this month.

So, what do you think?  Is your career ‘golden’?  Or are you concerned that if you’re not careful, you could be ‘gone’?  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.

For the Fifth Year, Florida is the Place to Be for eDiscovery Education: eDiscovery Trends

The fifth annual University of Florida E-Discovery Conference is coming up one week from today, on March 30, and you can attend even if you don’t plan to be in the state of Florida on that day.

Not surprisingly, given the new technology CLE requirement in Florida, the focus of the conference this year is competence in 2017.  As the conference site notes, it’s “no longer your grandfather’s e-discovery (circa 2005). There are exciting new e-discovery tools, new offerings and huge new challenges against a backdrop of increasing demands for competence by judicial officials.”

Notable speakers include Craig Ball, George Socha of BDO Consulting, David Horrigan of kCura, Ralph Losey of Jackson Lewis, Mary Mack of ACEDS, Kenya Dixon of the FTC, Corey Lee of Hunton & Williams and Sonya Strnad from Holland & Knight.  Not to mention a number of federal and state judges, including U.S. Magistrates William Matthewman, Anthony Porcelli, and Gary Jones, Florida Circuit Court Judge Meenu Sasser, and retired Florida Circuit Court Judge Ralph Artigliere.

The conference includes topics ranging from cloud/social media/mobile devices preservation to collections on a budget to meet and confer to defending your keyword search.  The use of artificial intelligence for document review is explored, as well as efficient and reliable document review using contemporary tools.  The day ends with a judicial panel where federal and state judges discuss what they now expect from clients and attorneys.  A link to the Agenda is here.

For the first time, the University of Florida Levin College of Law is also sponsoring an E-Discovery CareerFest to respond to the growing interest of University of Florida law students in exploring career paths that involve electronic discovery and data analytic skills.  The CareerFest will be conducted the day before the main conference, Wednesday, March 29, from 3:00 to 5:30PM ET.

The 2017 UF Law E-Discovery Conference has been approved for 6 General, 6 Technology and 1 Ethics CLE credits by the Florida Bar.  If you plan to attend in person, the event will once again take place at the University of Florida Levin College of Law campus.  But, if you can’t attend in person, the event will also (once again) be streamed online.

The conference costs $199 to attend in person or $99 to attend via livestream.  Members of the 8th Judicial Circuit Bar Association, ACEDS and Friends of the conference are eligible to receive a discounted rate.  The conference is free to attend in person or via livestream to all employees of federal and state government agencies, judges and judicial staff, students, and academics.  To register for the conference, click on the “Register Now” link on the conference web site here.

So, what do you think?  Are you attending the conference?  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. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

The Cowen Group 2016 eDiscovery and Litigation Support Salary Report: eDiscovery Trends

A couple of weeks ago, we covered the Robert Half 2017 Legal Salary Guide with a specific focus on litigation support and eDiscovery salaries.  This week, we’re covering results from the Tenth Annual Salary Survey from The Cowen Group.  Let’s take a look at this latest opportunity to push for that raise you’ve been wanting.

This year, there were 244 responses received from law firms (36% Large Law respondents, 22% Mid-Law), service providers (19%), corporations (19%) and government (4%), with over 50 organizations providing compensation information for their eDiscovery teams to bolster and corroborate data received from individual survey respondents.  Here are a few other noteworthy findings from the 15 page report.

  • New Positions: The Cowen Group predicted that approximately 245 new positions will be created in 2017, with the strongest growth and demand taking place in the vendor/service provider sector with particular emphasis being placed on technical professionals (60 new hires) and project managers (86), as well as growth positions such as data scientists (6), forensic professionals (20) and customer/client success experts (7).
  • Median Salaries Largely Flat: As was the case in the past two annual reports, median salaries remained relatively flat, with only a 0-2% median increase over last year’s numbers. The Cowen Group attributed the flattening of median salaries to several factors, including increased reporting from mid-law firms, growing hiring trends for eDiscovery positions in both mid-sized organizations and middle-market geographic locations, and differentiation in base salaries between law firm, corporate, and vendor market segments. One notable exception with regard to flat salaries was the eDiscovery attorney group, who reported a 16% median increase over base salaries from the previous year.
  • Bonuses Up: As compared to base salaries, annual bonuses appear to be increasing steadily across the board and average bonuses amounted to higher percentages of base salaries this year, especially for Manager (approximately $10,080 as compared to $7,660 in last year’s report), Director, (approximately $16,100 as compared to $9,890) and Attorney roles (approximately $29,830 as compared to $12,809).
  • eDiscovery Professionals are Certifiable: The Certified eDiscovery Specialists (“CEDS”) remained the most commonly held certifications across all titles and roles. The Relativity Certified Administrator (“RCA”) and LexisNexis LAW Prediscovery (“LAW”) were the most widely held technical certification across several positions as well, with RCA providing a slightly positive influence on salary in the analyst and project manager roles.

The report also provides the minimum and maximum reported salary for each primary position for this year, as well as the mean, median, low (25%) and high (75%).  Median salaries were charted for each position from 2008 through 2016.  It also reports on geographical and organizational trends and provides a data sheet for each of the five primary positions, with skills for success and top certifications.

This 15 page guide is also FREE and is available here.  Check it out.  Maybe you need a raise?

So, what do you think?  Do the numbers surprise you?  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. 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.

Janice Jaco and Brandye Fenn of LTC4: eDiscovery Trends

During the recent ILTACON conference (wrap-up post about the conference here), I had an opportunity to speak with several thought leaders that are involved with various educational initiatives in the eDiscovery industry, which spurred an idea to conduct a thought leader interview series of leaders within those organizations.  So, I will be publishing interviews with those thought leaders over the next few weeks.  Unlike the annual LegalTech New York (LTNY) interviews, I won’t be publishing a schedule for these (I’m actually still trying to line up a couple of those interviews post-show), but you will see them sprinkled in with regular blog posts over the next few weeks.

Today’s thought leaders are Janice Jaco and Brandye Fenn of the Legal Technology Core Competencies Certification Coalition (LTC4).  ACEDS’ 2015 eDiscovery Person of the Year, Janice, is the senior eDiscovery Project Manager for boutique litigation powerhouse Keesal, Young & Logan (KYL).  Janice’s professional volunteer work includes extensive involvement in authoring LTC4’s eDiscovery Core Competency, participation in ACEDS’ CEDS Exam Standard Setting Exercise, and updating ACEDS’ University online content.  Janice also plays an important role in shaping the “KYL Keeps You Learning” Framework, which has produced two ILTA Distinguished Peer Award winners and has led to KYL being the first firm in the world to pass the Procertas’ Legal Technology Assessment in 2015 as well as the first-ever recipient of ACEDS Law Firm e-Discovery Department of the Year award in 2016.

Brandye is the Litigation Support Manager at Ford Harrison LLP. With more than 28 years’ of law firm experience as a litigation paralegal, Brandye is responsible for managing eDiscovery projects for the firm’s 20+ offices, nationally. In 2011, she founded the FordHarrison Litigation Support Department and, through her extensive knowledge of eDiscovery best practices and industry standards, established and implemented new review and processing workflows and procedures. She is responsible for the oversight and management of the firm’s litigation technology and provides technical guidance to attorneys and clients on all phases of the EDRM and leads the firm’s e-discovery budgeting, forecasting, and technology initiatives. In 2015, she provided a cost benefit analysis in support of implementing an innovative cost-recovery model for recouping the firm’s litigation support services which gave clients better control over their eDiscovery project costs while allowing the firm to remain competitive with the latest technology.

Both Janice and Brandye were members of a team of litigation support professionals charged with developing the eDiscovery Core Competency (ECC) Learning Plan of LTC4. Over a 21-month period, the team collaborated and created scenario-based training modules to define the core competency standards for attorneys and legal professionals required to measure e-discovery competency.

For those readers who haven’t heard of it, what can you tell us about LTC4?

Janice: In 2010, a group of like-minded industry people got together and realized that they were creating content and training materials and learning guidelines independently.  They thought that it would be great if they pooled resources together to respond to client demand for proof of efficiency and competency and did that by pooling resources across the industry to create industry standard competencies that could be the basis for that proof, which would be the certification.  From that genesis, LTC4 was born.  Today, there are now ten learning plans, including the new Electronic Discovery Core Competency learning plan that has just been peer reviewed and released.

Firms are free to develop their own training programs around those learning plans.  Then, a trainer at a firm could submit documentation demonstrating that a certain user in the firm has completed the training program associated with a particular learning plan and receive a certification.

There are vendors who train to the program and provide the LTC4 certification.  I can tell you that we have been utilizing our certifications in responses to requests for proposal from clients and potential clients.  We feel that this “proof learning” is a great way to attract and retain clients, so, from a business perspective, we feel that the ROI is there.

Brandye: I think clients are also adopting it.  They are going to their outside counsel and saying if we’re doing this, we want you to show us that you can do this as well, and that you have a base level of knowledge.  Whether the law firms were required to do this by their clients or whether they felt like they needed to do this just on their own, either way it’s become a great marriage.

Janice: I think the law firm that’s proactive and can be on (if not the “bleeding edge”) the leading edge of these changes will be in the best position for continuing to thrive and maintaining its market position.  You don’t want to be that firm waiting for the client to tell you that you need to do it.

Brandye: Or be asked for it in an RFP where you have to say, “Well, that’s part of our plan for next year.”

You have mentioned the eDiscovery learning plan, what are the others?

Janice: They are: Legal Documents, Managing Documents and E-mails, Collaborating with Others: E-Mailing and Sharing Documents, Time and Billing, Road Warriors, Data, Reports and Exhibits, Security, Working with Clients (CRM), Presentations and eDiscovery/eDisclosure.  You can find out more about the learning plans at http://www.ltc4.org/learning-plans/.

Since we’re an eDiscovery blog, our readers would be specifically interested in the eDiscovery plan.  What can you tell me about that plan that was just released?

Brandye: I was part of the group that developed the plan and it took us 21 months.  It was such a blur of fun and camaraderie (laughs) and multiple phone calls and Google docs.  What we did was try to approach it from a standpoint of things you need to know, things you should know and things you must know.  Then we flipped it and determined, for each of those things, who needs to know it and why.

When I started this process, I did not know anything about LTC4.  Bonnie Beuth (Chair of LTC4) called, explained what the project was about and asked if I’d like to help.  I agreed to help and talk to others about it and, the next thing you know, I was locked in and responsible for deliverables.  The process was so collegial, with everybody addressing the problems from a unique standpoint.  We even had someone from the UK, Andrew Haslam, to provide an international perspective.  And, it was one of the most enlightening experiences.

Janice: It was for me too.

Brandye: I learned so much.  You’re “stuck in a bubble” in your own world of your processes, your workflow, your people and what they know and don’t know.  Working with people in the group you get a lot of different perspectives on how they do things, which can be quite a bit different from how you do them.  It’s really fantastic to get those different perspectives and it really made a true believer out of me.

We took it in steps, eDiscovery steps, and tried to keep it grouped to the EDRM workflow – loosely – and also real-world scenarios.  Such as, what happens when you receive data and what happens when you need to produce a group of documents?  So, we took real world problems and worked to identify solutions to those problems.  We worked to identify what an attorney should do, what a paralegal should do, what a lit support person should do – and took it to its natural conclusion in each of those sections.

Janice: In my experience, there is sometimes a disconnect between what attorneys think they need to know to be competent and what lit support managers like Brandye and I think they need to know to be competent.

Brandye: Or even what the courts think they need to know to be competent.  I’ve heard Judge Peck say dozens of times to attorneys this is what you need to know and they sometimes still don’t recognize it.

Janice: For example, they sometimes need reminders to pursue FRCP Rule 502(d) orders in federal court cases where significant email volumes are expected to be produced.  The task is not necessarily one that presents as part of the standard litigation workflow.

Brandye: Or they’re still doing “drive by” meet and confers.

Janice: So, I googled to try to find something similar and the only thing that I found that was remotely close to the ECC Learning Plan was the EDRM Talent Matrix, which talks about tasks in eDiscovery and the different talent typically best suited to performing these tasks.  For example, the lawyer isn’t usually the person pushing the buttons to get a production out.  In the course of working with lawyers and our clients), I try to explain why I think an approach, tool or process is the best fit for the current case or scenario.  Over the years I have had team members question why I think my recommendation is the best one and even whether they need to know that.  A learning plan like this one is a way to validate your recommended people, process and technology so lawyers can competently supervise my work and even clients could validate the workflow and recommendations.  Governing bodies like the American Bar Association or the California State Bar are being clear that you don’t have to be able to do all ediscovery tasks yourself, but you’re going to have to be able to effectively supervise someone like me to ensure that I’m doing the right thing for the clients in the most efficient, just and speedy way.

So, for the first time ever, we had a group of like-minded thought leaders collectively building something that we all could agree at the end was a collection of basic skills needed to execute these ediscovery scenarios.  There’s nothing like that in the industry.

Brandye: You can talk about rules and work processes, but putting them in context of scenarios and what to do in those scenarios is key.  It helps people match their situation to what they’re supposed to do, so they can say “I’ve been in this situation before and I know exactly what they’re talking about and I know exactly what to do.”

Janice: It enables people to say “I’ve had this scenario before, but I’ve never had these nine steps to address it in this way before like I do now.”  I think trainers everywhere are going to be so relieved to see something that backs up what they’ve been saying to lawyers for years.  Sometimes, like it is with kids when they listen to a teacher in school after they’ve been told the same thing over and over again by their parents–you don’t necessarily listen to the ones closest to you.  You need a credible outside source to reinforce what internal people have been saying.  Attorneys sometimes just need to hear it from someone else before they believe it.  And, that’s what the lesson plans provide.

How does one become a member of LTC4?

Janice: You can go to the LTC4 site here for more information on how to join and access the online application.  It’s easy for any law firm to join.  There is a membership fee which is based on size of firm.  There are also rates and plans for law schools, non-profit organizations and vendors.  And, you get access to all of the learning plans when you join.

Brandye: And, it’s not just about the learning plans, it’s a truly collaborative organization.  You also get support from LTC4 and from the members within the organization.  If you’re working in an area, for example, labor employment law, you can reach out to that community for assistance.

Janice: For example, security is one of the learning plans and mobile security is an important topic.  There are members who have that expertise who support you and help you create documentation through the certification, which you can then use to market yourself to clients and the prove you have the skills in cybersecurity.

Thanks, Janice and Brandye, 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. 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.

eDiscovery Throwback Thursdays – How things evolved, part 3

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa 1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in the past couple of weeks we’ve discussed how things have evolved — we’ll continue that this week. First, though, If you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In the past couple of weeks we’ve talked about the form in which document collections were stored and the evolution – first in paper form, then on microfilm, then microfiche, and then as digital images.  Database content has evolved too.  Early databases included coded information only.  In the mid 1980’s, litigation support professionals starting thinking about and talking about OCR (optical character recognition) technology, mostly because one of the main-stream litigation support vendors promoted the advantages of full-text databases.

The primary advantage was, of course, the availability of all words on a document for searching.  There was a price-tag though, because the starting point was still paper.  Text was captured in an OCR scanning process.  Like image technology, full-text took a while to catch on in our industry.  The biggest hurdle initially was a lack of confidence in the results – with good reason.  At the time, searching the internet wasn’t mainstream, so the average litigation team member wasn’t comfortable with employing a less-than-rigid search method.

In addition, search technology was less advanced than it is today, so there was a greater burden on the user to get a search right.  And, OCR technology wasn’t as advanced either, so there were a lot of errors in the scanning process – errors that affected search results. Over time, however, these things changed.  Average business people became more and more comfortable searching text (thanks in large part to Google); search technology advanced; and OCR technology advanced.

Eventually, including full-text in a database became the norm, and even started replacing coded information.  Another factor that contributed to the evolution of full-text was the cost to store data.  It used to be expensive.  I remember sitting in meetings where attorneys debated on things like using abbreviations and punctuation in databases because of the expense of storage – they looked for every way they could to cut down on the data that was stored.  As storage costs went down over the years, it became easier to justify including full-text in databases.

These changes — databases that included images and full-text, coupled with advanced search technology – made a huge change in how litigation databases were used.  Databases were no longer a ‘back-office’ tool – they were used directly by attorneys, and they provided attorneys with very, very fast access to their documents.  By the mid 1990’s litigation databases were not only main stream, but they were regularly portable.  Not only did attorneys have almost-immediate access to their documents – they had that access even when not in the office.

This brings us up to the 1990’s, at which point electronic discovery quickly emerged as the next big advancement.  I won’t cover the evolution of it in this series… CloudNine has documented that well here in its eDiscovery Daily Blog.

This post concludes the Throwback Thursday blog series. I hope you enjoyed this look back at the way things used to be in our industry!

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

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 Blog Throwback Thursdays – How things evolved, Part 2

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa 1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in last week’s blog, we started discussing how things have evolved.  In the next posts, we’ll continue discussion of things evolved, but first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Last week, I described the use of microfilm and microfiche to store document collections.  As most of you know, the next step in the evolution process was a move to storing documents as images.

This was a huge step in the world of litigation support, and honestly it was long overdue when it finally became adopted as a standard.  Like so many advancements, it was ‘looked at’ and ‘talked about’ for years before it became the norm.  One of the most significant hurdles was simply cost:  while the cost to scan documents to create images wasn’t much different than the costs to photocopy or film, image viewing technology was expensive.  Firms did not already have this technology, and corporate clients were not willing to bear the cost.  Eventually, however, it caught on.  By the late 1980’s more and more litigation teams were building databases with images.

There were other changes happening that helped this along – a couple of which meant using images only made sense:

  1. The use of computers in general was becoming more widespread.  Computers were no longer only used by large companies.  Small and mid-sized companies were using them.  PCs were introduced to the world so large main-frame computers and mini computers were not the only option. Desktop computers were becoming widespread.
  2. Because the use of computers was growing, more and more commercial software products were available, including commercial litigation support products.  Two of the first popular commercial products were Inmagic and BRS Search.

Because of these changes, technology use in law firms grew.  Law firms were buying computers for use by attorneys and paralegals.  Law firms started hiring IT staff.  Law firms started hiring litigation support professionals and buying litigation support software.  In short, law firms were developing internal resources to build and maintain databases.  They were creating an infrastructure that could support the use of images.

Including images in litigation support databases caused another shift in the way databases were used:  because the documents themselves were immediately available in a database, databases were being used more and more often directly by attorneys.  They were no longer a ‘back-office’ function.  For many years, it was common for law firms to have ‘walk-up’ litigation support stations, but these ‘walk-up’ stations were often used by attorneys, and eventually it became normal to see a computer on every desk in a law firm.

Tune in next week and we’ll continue discussion of how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

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 Throwback Thursdays – How Things Evolved

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used.  We’ve come a long way since then, and in the next posts I’m going to talk a bit about how things evolved.  But first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Litigators who used databases circa 1980 – for the most part – recognized a significant improvement in efficiencies.  As technology and approaches evolved over time, more efficiencies were realized.

One of the first big changes in how we worked was the use of microfilm.  Paper documents were still photocopied and coded, but microfilm became the preferred mechanism for storing and retrieving documents.  While the technology had been around for quite a long time, the litigation projects I worked on used paper repositories up until the early 1980s, which is when microfilm started to become the standard. This approach offered multiple advantages, the most significant being:

  1. It dramatically reduced the amount of space required to store a document collection.  The documents for a large case could be stored in a box or two rather than in a room or two. This also meant that it was reasonable to have multiple copies of a document collection stored in offices convenient for the litigation team, rather than a single, central repository of documents.
  2. Attorneys still used central repositories to handle large document pulls, but with microfilm It was faster and easier to retrieve those documents — turnaround time was much better.
  3. It preserved the integrity of the document collection.  Once a collection was filmed, pages wouldn’t be lost, shuffled, or damaged.

So, what is microfilm and how does it work?  Micro-reproductions of document pages are stored on reels of film.  Here’s a picture:

 

Those reels are labeled with the inclusive document number range.  Now — when doing a document pull – instead of locating a box and pulling a document to photocopy, you would locate a reel, thread it on a microfilm reader (see picture above), scroll to the correct frame, and hit a print button.

This approach evolved even further, and we started using microfiche.  The principle was the same, but the film was stored on cards instead of reels:

 

The cards were stored in sleeves labeled with the inclusive document numbers, and the cards were inserted into a microfiche reader.

Let me point out that microfilm and microfiche are still in use today in many libraries around the country.  Most libraries are no longer ‘filming’ new documents (they’re using imaging technology), but many still have historic collections of newspaper and magazine articles stored on microfilm or microfiche.

Tune in next week — we’ll continue discussion of how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

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 Throwback Thursdays – How Databases Were Used, Circa Early 1980s, Part 5

So far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, we’ve covered how databases were built, and we started discussing how databases were used.  We’re going to continue that in this post.  But first, if you missed the earlier posts in this series, they can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In last week’s post, we covered searching a database.  As I mentioned, searches were typically done by a junior level litigation team member who was trained to use the search engine.  Search results were printed on thermal paper, and that paper was flattened, folded accordion style, and given to a senior attorney to review – with the goal of identifying the documents he or she would like to see.  Those printouts included information that was recorded by a coder for each document.  A typical database record on a printout might look like this:

DocNo: PL00004568 – 4572

DocDate: 08/15/72

DocType: LETTER

Title: 556 Specifications

Characteristics: ANNOTATED; NO SIGNATURE

Author: Jackson-P

Author Org: ABC Inc.

Recipient: Parker-T

Recipient Org: XYZ Corp.

Copied: Franco-W; Hopkins-R

Copied Org: ABC Inc.

Mentioned: Phillips-K; Andrews-C

Subjects: A122 Widget 556; C320 Instructions

Contents: This letter incudes specifications for product 556 and requests confirmation that it meets requirements.

Source: ABC-Parker

The attorney reviewing the printout would determine (based on the coded information) which documents to review – checking those off with a pen.

The marked up printout was delivered to the archive librarian for ‘pulling’.  We NEVER turned over the original (from the archive’s ‘original working copy’).  Rather, an archive clerk worked with the printout, locating boxes that included checked documents, and locating the documents within those boxes. The clerk made a photocopy of each document, returned the originals to their boxes, and placed the photocopies in a second box.  When the ‘document pull’ was complete, a QC clerk verified the copies against the printout to ensure nothing was missed, and then the copies were delivered to the attorney.

In last week’s post, I mentioned how long it took for a database to get built.  Once the database was available for use, retrievals were slow, by today’s standards.  Depending on the number of documents to be pulled, it could take days for an attorney to get a stack of documents back to review.  While that would be unacceptable today, it was a huge improvement over the alternative at the time – which was to flip through an entire document collection eyeballing every page looking for documents of interest.  For example, when preparing for a deposition, a team of paralegals would get to work going through boxes of documents and eyeballing every page looking for the deponent’s name.

Working with a database then was – by today’s standards – done at a snail’s pace.  But the time savings at the time were significant.  And the search results were usually more thorough.  On one project I managed, just as the database loading was completed, an attorney called me to say he was preparing for a deposition and had his paralegals manually review the collection looking for the deponent’s name.  They spent a week doing it and found under 200 documents. He was uncomfortable with those results.  I told him the database was almost available – we just had to do some testing – but I could do a search for him.  I did that while he waited on the phone and quickly reported back to him that the database search found almost twice as many documents.  We delivered the documents to him within a couple of days.

Tune in next week and we’ll cover how the litigation world circa 1980 evolved and got to where it is today.

Please let us know if there are eDiscovery topics you’d like to see us cover in eDiscoveryDaily.

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.

Litigation Support Tools of the Trade – eDiscovery Best Practices

If you have worked in litigation support for a number of years like I have, you start to assemble a toolkit of applications that help you get your job done more quickly and efficiently.  In her excellent Litigation Support Guru blog, Amy Bowser-Rollins (who was previously profiled on THIS blog) has recently published a series of posts that describe tools of the trade that she recommends to litigation support “newbies”.  Let’s take a look.

The entire series of 18 Tools of the Trade is available here.  Here are the specific tools that she covers:

  1. TextPad
  2. Snagit
  3. Unstoppable Copier
  4. Concordance CPL to convert DAT to DCB
  5. Bulk Rename Utility
  6. TrueCrypt
  7. FileZilla
  8. Beyond Compare
  9. Dan Biemer Concordance CPLs
  10. Tableau
  11. Avery DesignPro
  12. UltraEdit
  13. FTK Imager (also previously discussed on our blog here, here, here, here and here)
  14. Directory Lister Pro
  15. iConvert
  16. Hard Drive SATA/IDE Adapter
  17. 7-Zip
  18. AutoCAD Viewer

Whether you need to edit large text files, perform screen captures, copy or rename files, manipulate data for Concordance, encrypt data for transfer, FTP data using an intuitive interface, capture data from a drive without spoliating evidence, create CD labels, convert load files, compress file collections or view engineering drawings, there is an application for you.  I personally use many of these frequently, including TextPad, Snagit, TrueCrypt, FileZilla, Beyond Compare, FTK Imager and iConvert.

Several of these applications are free.  Most are at least inexpensive.  They are vital “tools of the trade” for litigation support professionals.  Kudos to Amy for a terrific blog series!

So, what do you think?  What “tools of the trade” do you have in your litigation support “tool belt”?  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.