eDiscovery

Announcing eDiscovery Thought Leader Q&A Series!

 

eDiscovery Daily is excited to announce a new blog series of Q&A interviews with various eDiscovery thought leaders.  Over the next three weeks, we will publish interviews conducted with six individuals with unique and informative perspectives on various eDiscovery topics.  Mark your calendars for these industry experts!

Christine Musil is Director of Marketing for Informative Graphics Corporation, a viewing, annotation and content management software company based in Arizona.  Christine will be discussing issues associated with native redaction and redaction of Adobe PDF files.  Her interview will be published this Thursday, October 14.

Jim McGann is Vice President of Information Discovery for Index Engines. Jim has extensive experience with the eDiscovery and Information Management.  Jim will be discussing issues associated with tape backup and retrieval.  His interview will be published this Friday, October 15.

Alon Israely is a Senior Advisor in BIA’s Advisory Services group and currently oversees BIA’s product development for its core technology products.  Alon will be discussing best practices associated with “left side of the EDRM model” processes such as preservation and collection.  His interview will be published next Thursday, October 21.

Chris Jurkiewicz is Co-Founder of Venio Systems, which provides Venio FPR™ allowing legal teams to analyze data, provide an early case assessment and a first pass review of any size data set.  Chris will be discussing current trends associated with early case assessment and first pass review tools.  His interview will be published next Friday, October 22.

Kirke Snyder is Owner of Legal Information Consultants, a consulting firm specializing in eDiscovery Process Audits to help organizations lower the risk and cost of e-discovery.  Kirke will be discussing best practices associated with records and information management.  His interview will be published on Monday, October 25.

Brad Jenkins is President and CEO for Trial Solutions, which is an electronic discovery software and services company that assists litigators in the collection, processing and review of electronic information.  Brad will be discussing trends associated with SaaS eDiscovery solutions.  His interview will be published on Tuesday, October 26.

We thank all of our guests for participating!

So, what do you think?  Is there someone you would like to see interviewed for the blog?  Are you an industry expert with some information to share from your “soapbox”?  If so, please share any comments or contact me at daustin@trialsolutions.net.  We’re looking to assemble our next group of interviews now!

eDiscovery Case Study: Term List Searching for Deadline Emergencies!

 

A few weeks ago, I was preparing to conduct a Friday morning training session for a client to show them how to use FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™, to conduct a first pass review of their data when I received a call from the client.  “We thought we were going to have a month to review this data, but because of a judge’s ruling in the case, we now have to start depo prep for two key custodians on Monday for depositions now scheduled next week”, said Megan Moore, attorney with Steele Sturm, PLLC, in Houston.  “We have to complete our review of their files this weekend.”

So, what do you do when you have to conduct both a first pass and final review of the data in a weekend?

It was determined that Steele Sturm had to complete first pass review that Friday, so that we could prepare the potentially responsive files for an attorney review starting Saturday morning.  Steele Sturm identified a list of responsive search terms and Trial Solutions worked with the attorneys to include variations of the terms (such as proximity searches and synonyms) to finalize a list of terms to apply to the data to identify potentially responsive files.  Because FirstPass provides the ability to import and search an entire term list at once, we were able to identify potentially responsive files in a simple, two step process.  “Using FirstPass, Trial Solutions helped us cull out 75% of the collection as non-responsive, enabling our review team to focus review on the remaining 25%”, said Moore.

Once the potentially responsive files were identified, they were imported into OnDemand™, powered by ImageDepot™, for linear attorney review.  During review, the attorneys identified that some of the terms used in identifying potentially responsive files were overbroad, so additional searches were performed in OnDemand to “group tag” those files as non-responsive.  “Trial Solutions provided training and support throughout the weekend to enable our review team to quickly "tag" each file using OnDemand as to responsiveness and privilege to enable us to meet our deadline”, said Moore.

So, what do you think?  Do you have any “emergency” war stories to share?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Project Management: Preparing a Budget

Tuesday, we talked about putting together a “big picture plan” for your project. And, yesterday, we provided step-by-step instructions for preparing a schedule for a specific task and identifying the resources you’ll need. Now let’s talk about preparing a budget.

Preparing a Budget

Depending on the task, there may be a lot of cost components in your budget. For many projects – for example, a document review project – the biggest cost component will be people. Let’s continue to use the document review task example.

When you prepared your schedule, you determined the number of man-hours required for the core part of the task. Take that number and multiply it by the billing rate of the team doing the work. This will most likely be your biggest cost component. Now let’s add on other costs:

  • In addition to the team doing the work, you’ll need quality control reviewers. If you want to do thorough quality control work, It’s safe to estimate that you’ll need 1 quality control person for every 4 reviewers. Calculate the number of man-hours for quality control and multiply that by the billing rate for the quality control staff.
  • Build in project management and supervisory staff hours. Maybe your quality control team will double as supervisors and all you’ll need to add in are the costs for a full-time project manager.
  • Determine how long training will take, and add in the costs for everybody on the team to attend training.
  • If you’re using a service provider to host your documents and provide an online review tool, add in the costs for that (some service providers charge monthly for storage; others charge monthly for storage and monthly per user).
  • Add in the costs for up-front work like preparing procedures and coordinating efforts with the service provider.
  • Add in costs for processing data and loading into the online review tool.

That may be it. But think through incidental costs you might incur and include them in your budget.

We’ve covered all of the basic components of planning a project, but we’re not done with planning yet. One of the tasks on a large electronic discovery project is yet another planning task: Preparing a plan for gathering data. Next time, I’ll walk you through putting together a data-gathering plan.

So, what do you think? Do you have any questions about the budgeting process? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Project Management: Identifying Resources and Preparing a Schedule

Yesterday, we talked about putting together a “big picture plan” for your electronic discovery project. Now let’s move on to the nitty-gritty and get into resource, schedule, and budget details.

Identifying Resources and Preparing a Schedule

You need to do detailed planning for each task that you listed in your big picture plan. This means calculating a schedule and a budget and determining the resources you will need. For some tasks — like processing data – your needs will be primarily computing resources. In many cases you’ll be looking to a service provider for this work, and they can provide schedule and cost information. For other tasks – like document reviews – your greatest need will be people. This is where schedules and budgets are absolutely critical and need to be done carefully. Tasks that involve a lot of manpower hours are the ones that can get you into the most trouble with meeting deadlines and staying within budgets. Here are some very clear steps for preparing your plan:

  • Determine how many units there are to be processed. For a document review, that would be the number of documents or files that need to be reviewed.
  • Determine how many units can be processed in an hour (if you don’t already have a good feel for this, do some “time and motion” tests or talk to experienced peers).
  • Divide the total number of units by the number of units that can be processed in an hour. Now you have an estimate of the total project hours needed to complete the project.
  • Determine how many available calendar hours you have to do the work (for example, if your project needs to be completed in four weeks, you have 160 calendar hours).
  • Divide the total project hours by the calendar hours to determine the number of people you will need.

Build in some time for project start-up tasks like preparing instructions and training the review team, and build in some time on the end for tasks like final quality control reviews. That’s it. You know how many people you need, and your schedule is done. Tomorrow, we’ll walk through preparing a budget.

So, what do you think? Have any stories to tell regarding resource identification or scheduling difficulties? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Project Management: “Big Picture” Planning

Yesterday, we introduced the series focused on Applying Project Management Techniques to Electronic Discovery and the areas we will cover over the next few weeks. Today, we will begin the discussion with planning the project.

It is unlikely that any project will be successful without good planning – both “big picture” planning and the planning of specific tasks. First you need to look at the 10,000 foot view and identify all the pieces and how they fit together. Then you need to look at the specific pieces and prepare a plan for accomplishing each.

“Big Picture” Planning

Let’s walk through a common scenario to illustrate preparing a big picture plan. Let’s say you are responsible for managing the electronic discovery tasks on a case, starting with the collection of documents and carrying through to production.

As a first step, identify the tasks that are required. Your task list might look like this:

  • Determine where responsive materials may reside and prepare a data collection plan.
  • Make forensically sound copies of potentially responsive materials.
  • Identify a service provider to process data and load into a first pass review tool.
  • Use the first pass review tool to cull the collection (this should be done by litigation team members who are familiar with the case and the documents, and who are responsible for case strategy and making decisions. They should work together with search technology experts).
  • Identify the review tool to use for identifying responsive documents.
  • Assemble and train the review team
  • Manage the document review team
  • Generate the production set.

Of course, the tasks on your list will depend on the scope of your project and the size of your collection. You many not need to include all of the tasks on this list, or you may need to include more.

For each task on your list, determine by when it needs to be done, who will be responsible, and a general approach (for example, you may determine that you’ll need a contract team for reviewing documents).

There you go. You’ve got your big picture plan for moving forward. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about planning specific tasks.

So, what do you think? Need any help with “big picture” planning to get your project off to a good start? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Project Management: Applying Project Management Techniques to Electronic Discovery

All too often, electronic discovery projects fall apart. Deadlines are missed, costs exceed estimates, work product is flawed, and there aren’t good records of what was done. These problems can result in costs and hours that can’t be billed, dissatisfied clients, and in really bad situations, sanctions imposed by the court.

In so many cases, the problems can be avoided – or at least minimized – if basic, “common sense” project management techniques are applied. Project Management is not complicated or difficult. It is simply applying common sense principles to the projects that we handle.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about common sense project management techniques and how they can – and should – be applied to electronic discovery projects. We’ll cover several areas:

  • Planning a project: Identifying the tasks that need to be done, putting together a “big picture” plan, and creating schedules and budgets for each task.
  • Creating procedures: Why are documented procedures important and how do you prepare effective procedures?
  • Assembling the right team: Who should do the work on a given task and how do you determine that?
  • Training the team: Why is training important and what should be covered?
  • Doing effective quality control: Why are quality control reviews important, how should they be done, and how often should they be done?
  • Monitoring the work: How do you ensure that you’re on schedule and within budget for a project?
  • Reporting: What kind of reporting should be done and how often?
  • Effectively managing your staff: Some quick tips for getting good work from your staff.
  • Effectively managing external resources: What can you do before a project starts, at the start of a project, and throughout a project to ensure that service providers are meeting schedules, budgets and quality requirements?
  • Effectively managing your time: Some quick tips for managing your time so you’ll be as productive and effective as possible.

Tomorrow, I’ll begin talking about “big picture” planning for the overall project. See you then!

In the meantime, what do you think? Know any project management “horror stories”? Are there any specific project management areas you are having trouble with? Please share any comments you might have or let us know if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Best Practices: Cost of Data Storage is Declining – Or Is It?

Recently, I was gathering information on the cost of data storage and ran across this ad from the early 1980s for a 10 MB disk drive – for $3,398! That’s MB (megabytes), not GB (gigabytes) or TB (terabytes). What a deal!

Even in 2000, storage costs were around $20 per GB, so an 8 GB drive would cost about $160.

Today, 1 TB is available for $100 or less. HP has a 2 TB external drive available at Best Buy for $140 (prices subject to change of course). That’s 7 cents per GB. Network storage drives are more expensive, but still available for around $100 per TB.

At these prices, it’s natural for online, accessible data in corporations to rise exponentially. It’s great to have more and more data readily available to you, until you are hit with litigation or regulatory requests. Then, you potentially have to go through all that data for discovery to determine what to preserve, collect, process, analyze, review and produce.

Here is what each additional GB can cost to review (based on typical industry averages):

  • 1 GB = 20,000 documents (can vary widely, depending on file formats)
  • Review attorneys typically average 60 documents reviewed per hour (for simple relevancy determinations)
  • That equals an average of 333 review hours per GB (20,000 / 60)
  • If you’re using contract reviewers at $50 per hour – each extra GB just cost you $16,650 to review (333×50)

That’s expensive storage! And, that doesn’t even take into consideration the costs to identify, preserve, collect, and process each additional GB.

Managing Storage Costs Effectively

One way to manage those costs is to limit the data retained in the first place through an effective records management program that calls for regular destruction of data not subject to a litigation hold. If you’re eliminating expired data on a regular basis, there is less data to go through the EDRM discovery “funnel” to production.

Sophisticated collection tools or first pass review tools (like FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™) can also help cull data for attorney review to reduce those costs, which is the most expensive component of eDiscovery.

So, what do you think? Do you track GB metrics for your eDiscovery cases? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

First Pass Review: Domain Categorization of Your Opponent’s Data

Yesterday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through “fuzzy” searching to find misspellings or OCR errors in an opponent’s produced ESI.

Domain Categorization

Another type of analysis is the use of domain categorization. Email is generally the biggest component of most ESI collections and each participant in an email communication belongs to a domain associated with the email server that manages their email.

FirstPass supports domain categorization by providing a list of domains associated with the ESI collection being reviewed, with a count for each domain that appears in emails in the collection. Domain categorization provides several benefits when reviewing your opponent’s ESI:

  • Non-Responsive Produced ESI: Domains in the list that are obviously non-responsive to the case can be quickly identified and all messages associated with those domains can be “group-tagged” as non-responsive. If a significant percentage of files are identified as non-responsive, that may be a sign that your opponent is trying to “bury you with paper” (albeit electronic).
  • Inadvertent Disclosures: If there are any emails associated with outside counsel’s domain, they could be inadvertent disclosures of attorney work product or attorney-client privileged communications. If so, you can then address those according to the agreed-upon process for handling inadvertent disclosures and clawback of same.
  • Issue Identification: Messages associated with certain parties might be related to specific issues (e.g., an alleged design flaw of a specific subcontractor’s product), so domain categorization can isolate those messages more quickly.

In summary, there are several ways to use first pass review tools, like FirstPass, for reviewing your opponent’s ESI production, including: email analytics, synonym searching, fuzzy searching and domain categorization. First pass review isn’t just for your own production; it’s also an effective process to quickly evaluate your opponent’s production.

So, what do you think? Have you used first pass review tools to assess an opponent’s produced ESI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

First Pass Review: Fuzzy Searching Your Opponent’s Data

Yesterday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through synonym searching to find variations of your search terms to increase the possibility of finding the terminology used by your opponents.

Fuzzy Searching

Another type of analysis is the use of fuzzy searching. Attorneys know what terms they’re looking for, but those terms may not often be spelled correctly. Also, opposing counsel may produce a number of image only files that require Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is usually not 100% accurate.

FirstPass supports “fuzzy” searching, which is a mechanism by finding alternate words that are close in spelling to the word you’re looking for (usually one or two characters off). FirstPass will display all of the words – in the collection – close to the word you’re looking for, so if you’re looking for the term “petroleum”, you can find variations such as “peroleum”, “petoleum” or even “petroleom” – misspellings or OCR errors that could be relevant. Then, simply select the variations you wish to include in the search. Fuzzy searching is the best way to broaden your search to include potential misspellings and OCR errors and FirstPass provides a terrific capability to select those variations to review additional potential “hits” in your collection.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the use of domain categorization to quickly identify potential inadvertent disclosures and weed out non-responsive files produced by your opponent, based on the domain of the communicators. Hasta la vista, baby!  🙂

In the meantime, what do you think? Have you used fuzzy searching to find misspellings or OCR errors in an opponent’s produced ESI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

First Pass Review: Synonym Searching Your Opponent’s Data

Yesterday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through email analytics to see the communication patterns graphically to identify key parties for deposition purposes and look for potential production omissions.

Synonym Searching

Another type of analysis is the use of synonym searching. Attorneys understand the key terminology their client uses, but they often don’t know the terminology their client’s opposition uses because they haven’t interviewed the opposition’s custodians. In a product defect case, the opposition may refer to admitted design or construction “mistakes” in their product or process as “flaws”, “errors”, “goofs” or even “flubs”. With FirstPass, you can enter your search term into the synonym searching section of the application and it will provide a list of synonyms (with hit counts of each, if selected). Then, you can simply select the synonyms you wish to include in the search. As a result, FirstPass identifies synonyms of your search terms to broaden the scope and catch key “hits” that could be the “smoking gun” in the case.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the use of fuzzy searching to find misspellings that may be commonly used by your opponent or errors resulting from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of any image-only files that they produce. Stay tuned! 🙂

In the meantime, what do you think? Have you used synonym searching to identify variations on terms in an opponent’s produced ESI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.