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Electronic Discovery

If You’re Going to Mine for Metadata in New Jersey, You May Want to Think Twice: eDiscovery Best Practices

A newly proposed adjustment to ethics rules in New Jersey would restrict attorneys from accessing metadata in documents if the metadata was inadvertently sent.

As discussed in the New Jersey Law Journal – Proposal Burdens Recipient in Ethics of Metadata E-Discovery, by David Gialanella (subscription required) – attorneys would be permitted to access the embedded metadata of documents produced in electronic discovery, but only as long as the metadata doesn’t appear to have been transmitted in error – the same way New Jersey lawyers have been required to treat the paper and electronic documents themselves.  The recommendation came from the Working Group on Ethical Issues Involving Metadata in Electronic Documents, which also urged discovery rule amendments.

In some cases, metadata can be accessed easily, and in others it must be “mined” using sophisticated software.  One big issue is that many (if not most) in the legal profession don’t know how metadata works and some don’t even know what it is.  Reviewing ethics opinions of other jurisdictions, the Working Group “found no consensus – indeed, no clear majority view – in the opinions of other jurisdictions with respect to the ethical implications of a lawyer’s review of unrequested metadata in a document transmitted to that lawyer.”  So, the Group had to make its own recommendations.

In its Report and Recommendations to the Supreme Court, dated September 14, 2015, the Working Group recommended:

  • That an Official Comment be added to New Jersey Rule of Professional Conduct 4.4(b) stating that lawyers who receive electronic documents may review unrequested metadata, provided that the receiving lawyer reasonably believes that the metadata was not inadvertently sent;
  • That the civil discovery rules be amended (and new Official Comments added) to highlight issues pertaining to metadata;
  • That steps be taken to minimize the disclosure of metadata in documents electronically filed with the Judiciary; and
  • That judges, lawyers, and law students be educated about metadata issues as a component of judicial education programs, continuing legal education, and law school curricula.

The Working Group recommended the following changes to Rule of Professional Conduct 4.4(b) (additions underlined and shown in red, deletions bracketed and shown in blue):

(b) A lawyer who receives a document or electronic information and has reasonable cause to believe that the document or information was inadvertently sent shall not read the document or information or, if he or she has begun to do so, shall stop reading [the document,] it. The lawyer shall (1) promptly notify the sender[,] and (2) return the document or information to the sender and, if in electronic form, delete it and take reasonable measures to assure that the information is inaccessible.

With regard to metadata in discovery, the Working Group “decided not to recommend any particular approach to metadata in discovery as a general default position”, but did recommend that the general Civil Part discovery rule, Rule 4:10-2, be amended to specifically address metadata in electronic documents.

A copy of the report can be found in the New Jersey Courts website here.

So, what do you think?  Is it unethical for attorneys to review inadvertently sent metadata?  Should discovery rules address the ethics of receiving metadata specifically?  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.

Here are Some Questions You Might Not Think to Ask Your Technology Provider: eDiscovery Best Practices

I love Rob Robinson’s Complex Discovery site.  Whether it’s information on eDiscovery provider mergers and acquisitions, a software and services mashup of the eDiscovery market, or links to many other useful resources, his is a site I check out pretty much daily.  His latest post discusses some questions that you might not think to ask your technology provider, because they might be “uncomfortable”.

In Six Uncomfortable Questions to Ask Your Technology Provider Immediately, Rob discusses failure to fully investigate a potential technology provider’s risk in relation to conflicts of interest, financial integrity, and adherence to the law when vetting those providers before entering into agreements.  As Rob notes, failure to ask questions like this could be due to not knowing what to ask, or it could be because those conversations are simply “uncomfortable”.

With that in mind, Rob identifies “six uncomfortable questions that all sourcing organizations should consider asking their technology providers today”.  They are:

  1. Is any member of your organization involved in any activity that may result in competing loyalties that could cause your organization to benefit at our expense?
  2. Is your organization prevented from engaging with any specific organization(s) by a contractual agreement, temporary restraining order, or a legal judgment?
  3. Has your organization withdrawn any publicly released announcements or materials because of the inability to substantiate claims?
  4. Does your organization have any unpaid federal, state, local or foreign income and employment taxes (as required) for the most recent three years of your organization’s existence?
  5. Is your organization involved in any current litigation or under the threat of potential litigation?
  6. Does your organization have any unsatisfied judgments?

Let’s face it, the quality of the technology offered by the provider may be moot if that provider has legal or financial issues or conflicts of interest that may affect the quality of the technology or services it provides.

Additional questions I like to ask relate to how long an organization has been in business and what is the average tenure of the key employees or executive team.  It’s good to know that you’re not dealing with a “fly by night” company that may not last.  While tenure and experience aren’t a guarantee for success, it certainly helps.  Have you looked at the standings in the National Football League lately?  It’s no accident that all of the undefeated teams have had the same coaching staffs for the last five to fifteen years (except one, and that team has Peyton Manning).  Experience makes a difference.

Rob’s article hits on a topic that people don’t talk much about.  If the provider is solid, those questions don’t have to be “uncomfortable”.  Thanks, Rob!

So, what do you think?  What “uncomfortable” questions do you ask your technology provider(s)?  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.

Court Orders Defendant to Supplement Data Used for Statistical Sampling: eDiscovery Case Law

In United States ex rel Guardiola v. Renown Health, No. 3:12-cv-00295-LRH-VPC, (D. Nev. Sep. 1, 2015), Nevada Magistrate Judge Valerie P. Cooke agreed with the relator’s contention that the data used to finalize the relator’s proposed statistical sampling plan was incomplete due to how data was identified within one of two billing systems used by the defendant.  As a result, she ordered the defendant to “EXPEDITIOUSLY PRODUCE” the additional data (and, yes, she used all caps).

Case Background

In this qui tam action under the False Claims Act (for which we covered a previous ruling here), the court had already held, in November 2014, that statistical sampling of claims was appropriate to save costs by enabling the parties to avoid examining every potential claim.  In the attempt for the relator (the person bringing the qui tam action on behalf of the United States) to finalize her proposed sampling plan, a dispute developed over the meaning of a zero-day stay at the defendant’s facilities.

The dispute arose because one of the defendant’s two billing systems used the patient’s registration time instead of the time the patient actually begins receiving inpatient medical care as the admit time – as a result, claims were falling out of the zero day stay population, which was defined as less than 24 hours from patient admit time to discharge time.  When reviewing the initial data for sampling, the relator was surprised that there were fewer claims than she expected – which lowered her chance of recovery in the case and ultimately later learned that this was due to how the billing system determined the admit time.  So she requested additional data to be produced.  The defendant objected, arguing that the relator sought “at this late hour” to acquire more data and alter the definition of a zero-day stay to include said data.

Judge’s Ruling

Noting that “[t]he question of relevancy should be construed liberally and with common sense and discovery should be allowed unless the information sought has no conceivable bearing on the case”, Judge Cooke stated:

“The time-adjusted data is discoverable, for it is indisputably relevant. Evidence is relevant when ‘it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence’ and ‘the fact is of consequence in determining the action.’…Relator has adequately explained the basis for her belief that the time-adjusted claims properly fall within the data universe for zero-day stays, based upon the guidelines for an inpatient stay and the problem with the Siemens’ ‘admit time.’”

Judge Cooke also noted that the defendant “retain[s] the right, and will have the opportunity, to question or attack the reliability of” the expert and the statistical sampling process.

Judge Cooke also considered whether her November order allowing for statistical sampling permitted the inclusion of the time-adjusted data in the sampling plan.  Based on the definition of a zero-day stay as “a hospital stay of less than 24 hours” (from time of admission), she ruled that “the November order permits inclusion of the time-adjusted claims.”  As a result, she ordered the defendant to “EXPEDITIOUSLY PRODUCE data consistent with relator’s proposal to include the time-adjusted claims” and for the parties to meet and confer to determine the plan for producing the data and finalizing the statistical sampling plan.

So, what do you think?  Was inclusion of the additional data appropriate?  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.

One in Three Companies Lacks an Information Security Policy, According to New Study: eDiscovery Trends

According to a new cybersecurity study, despite improvement in several areas, one in three companies still lacks policies for information security, data encryption and data classification.

As discussed in Inside Counsel (Majority of companies lack policies for info security), Protiviti, a global consulting firm which has served over 60 percent of Fortune 1000 and 35 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies has just released its 2015 IT Security and Privacy Survey, which aims to address whether organizations’ efforts are translating into effective policies to secure the “crown jewels” of organizations.

The survey, which gathered insights from 708 Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Technology Officers, IT VPs and directors and other IT management professionals, assesses security and privacy policies, data governance, data retention and storage, data destruction policies, and third-party vendors and access, among other topics.  48 percent of respondents work for organizations mainly in North America with $1 billion or more in revenue.

Other key findings:

  • Only 28% of respondents indicated that their board of directors had a high engagement and level of understanding with respect to information security risks, down from 30% in 2014 and only slightly higher than “don’t know” respondents at 25%;
  • Only 66% of companies had a written information security policy (WISP) and slightly more than half of responding companies (55%) had a social media policy;
  • Despite considerable recent press coverage of cybersecurity and data breaches, only 23% of respondents indicated significantly more interest and focus on information security, down from 32% last year;
  • For those companies where the respondents did indicate a high engagement with respect to information security risks, they indicated a reasonably high level of confidence (0 on a scale of 1-10) in their organization to monitor, detect and escalate potential security incidents by a well-funded attacker (as opposed to 6.5 for those companies without high board engagement in information security).

This is just a sampling of some of the key findings.  Like last week’s survey that we covered on eDiscovery, this survey report is free!  The full survey is available here with a handy-dandy one-page infographic of the survey results also available here.

So, what do you think?  Do any of these results 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.

Privilege Log Identifies Additional Documents to be Produced by Defendant: eDiscovery Case Law

In U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Commonwealth Advisors, Inc. et. al., No. 12-700 (M.D. La., Sept. 28, 2015), Louisiana Magistrate Judge Stephen C. Riedlinger ordered the defendants to produce additional documents that were identified on the defendants’ privilege log, but for which the defendants had waived attorney-client privilege.

Case Background

In this case, the district judge submitted a previous ruling that by December 2014, the defendants must “submit to the Plaintiff a revised privilege log that is in compliance with Fed.r.Civ.P. 26(b)(5)(A) and must produce to Plaintiff all documents for which the attorney client privilege has been waived by the assertion of the advice-of counsel defense.”  The defendants provided the plaintiff with revised privilege logs and produced some responsive documents, but the plaintiff asserted that the defendants had failed to produce all of the documents for which it had waived the attorney-client privilege, noting several documents were still included on the privilege log that related to “advice”.

Additionally, the plaintiff was provided with a production that did not redact purportedly privileged information from the original native-format files or from the searchable text metadata that was used to identify and locate specific documents.  Based on the examination of the metadata for selected documents, and a comparison of the metadata with the image file, the plaintiff believed that additional responsive material might be found on other redacted documents as well.  The defendants characterized the plaintiff’s revelation as “reconstructing the redacted portions of documents from metadata that was inadvertently included by a third-party vendor – a vendor made necessary by the SEC’s demand that all files be produced in a certain electronic format.”

As a result of these issues, the plaintiff moved to compel production of the remaining documents.

Judge’s Ruling

Noting that “the day after the Plaintiff’s Second Motion to Compel was filed the defendants advised the plaintiff that there was a problem with their production”, Judge Riedlinger stated that “by demanding that the plaintiff delete all of the incorrectly produced materials, which the plaintiff agreed to do, the defendants effectively failed to comply with the Ruling and Order” (from December 2014).  “Defendants’ otherwise timely production cannot be considered so when they demand a significant part of it — in terms of both volume and content — not be examined and also be deleted.”

Noting that, in his original order, the district judge “did not disagree with the determination that defendants’ privilege logs (provided up to that time) were wholly inadequate to sustain their assertion of the attorney-client privilege”, Judge Riedlinger found that “Defendants revised privilege logs are, overall, now less reliable than the ones they previously produced because they include insufficient and sometimes misleading document descriptions. Plaintiff has persuasively shown that the defendants improperly redacted at least two specific documents (Exhibits J and K), and there is good cause to believe there are more improperly redacted documents.”

As a result, Judge Riedlinger stated:

“The current circumstances support finding that the defendants waived their attorney-client privilege and should be required to produce all previously-withheld documents.  They failed to take any reasonable steps to prevent the disclosure of claimed still-privileged information by the manner of their December production. Only after the plaintiff brought it to their attention in this motion, filed more than six weeks later, did they do anything about it. Defendants provided deficient and sometimes misleading revised privilege logs which, overall, are not reliable. Defendants knowingly redacted materials which are subjects of their advice-ofcounsel attorney-client privilege waiver, and intentionally did not produce one document until they determined it was in their interest to do so. And lastly, but importantly, in these circumstance it is simply unfair to the plaintiff to allow the defendants to assert a broad advice-of-counsel defense, interpret it narrowly, and then based on their narrow interpretation withhold information and documents relevant to that defense.”

As a result, Judge Riedlinger granted the plaintiff’s motion to compel and ordered the defendants to “produce to the plaintiff, within 21 days, all documents withheld on the basis of attorney-client privilege, whether solely or in part.”

So, what do you think?  Did the defendants’ discovery failures cost them privilege assertions on some documents?  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.

New Survey of Corporate Counsel Finds Little Improvement in eDiscovery Capabilities Over the Last Year: eDiscovery Trends

According to the second annual Inside E-Discovery Survey by BDO Consulting, corporate organizations have made relatively little improvement in their eDiscovery technology capabilities over the past year, with the middle market falling the furthest behind.

The survey examined the opinions and insights of 140 senior in-house counsel at leading corporations throughout the US.  Some key findings include:

Adoption of New eDiscovery Technology:

  • With regard to adoption of new eDiscovery technology, 40 percent of respondents indicated that they use technology assisted review (TAR), 22 percent indicated that they use data visualization, 18 percent indicated that they use mobile document review, 12 percent indicated that they use expedited document review utilizing features such as voice commands and short keys and 12 percent indicated that they use up-to-the-minute project statistics and tracking via customized customer portals.

“Middle Market” Lagging:

  • 30 percent of organizations with revenues between $100 million and $1 billion (the “middle market”) have adopted technology-assisted review, compared to nearly half (47 percent) of organizations with revenues of $1 billion or above;
  • Only 15 percent of middle market organizations have adopted data visualization techniques, compared to 27 percent of larger organizations; and
  • 50 percent of middle market organizations indicated that they had adopted none of the five eDiscovery innovations/technological advances identified in the survey, compared to 38 percent of all organizations.

Biggest Challenges/Most Important Management Factors:

  • When asked what new eDiscovery issues would have the greatest impact on their organizations, the top three issues identified were: Volume, Variety and Velocity of Disparate Data (49 percent), Escalating Cost of eDiscovery (42 percent) and Regulatory Activity (40 percent);
  • In this order, respondents ranked Understanding universe of potential evidence early in case, Predicting total cost of eDiscovery early in case, Reducing eDiscovery review fees and Reducing eDiscovery processing fees as the top four most important factors affecting their management of eDiscovery in litigation.

Total eDiscovery Spending:

  • 39 percent of respondents indicated that their total spending on eDiscovery would increase in the next year, 56 percent indicated that spending would stay about the same and only 5 percent indicated that eDiscovery spending would decrease.

The full survey is available from BDO Consulting here; if you prefer less reading, an infographic of the survey results is also available here.  Feel free to check out our blog post about last year’s survey here.

So, what do you think?  Do any of these results 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.

Organize Your Collection by Message Thread to Save Costs During Review: eDiscovery Best Practices

This topic came up recently with a client, so I thought it was timely to revisit…

Not only is insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but in eDiscovery review, it can be even worse when you do get a different result.

One of the biggest challenges when reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) is identifying duplicates so that your reviewers aren’t reviewing the same files again and again.  Not only does that drive up costs unnecessarily, but it could lead to problems if the same file is categorized differently by different reviewers (for example, inadvertent production of a duplicate of a privileged file if it is not correctly categorized).

There are a few ways to identify duplicates.  Exact duplicates (that contain the exact same content in the same file format) can be identified through hash values, which are a digital fingerprint of the content of the file.  MD5 and SHA-1 are the most popular hashing algorithms, which can identify exact duplicates of a file, so that they can be removed from the review population.  Since many of the same emails are emailed to multiple parties and the same files are stored on different drives, deduplication through hashing can save considerable review costs.

Sometimes, files are exact (or nearly exact) duplicates in content but not in format.  One example is a Word document published to an Adobe PDF file – the content is the same, but the file format is different, so the hash value will be different.  Near-deduplication can be used to identify files where most or all of the content matches so they can be verified as duplicates and eliminated from review.

Another way to identify duplicative content is through message thread analysis.  Many email messages are part of a larger discussion, which could be just between two parties, or include a number of parties in the discussion.  To review each email in the discussion thread would result in much of the same information being reviewed over and over again.  Instead, message thread analysis pulls those messages together and enables them to be reviewed as an entire discussion.  That includes any side conversations within the discussion that may or may not be related to the original topic (e.g., a side discussion about lunch plans or did you see The Walking Dead last night).

CloudNine’s review platform (shameless plug warning!) is one example of an application that provides a mechanism for message thread analysis of Outlook emails that pulls the entire thread into one conversation for review in a popup window.  By doing so, you can focus your review on the last emails in each conversation to see what is said without having to review each email.

With message thread analysis, you can minimize review of duplicative information within emails, saving time and cost and ensuring consistency in the review.

So, what do you think?  Does your review tool support message thread analysis?   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.

Not Preserving Texts Results in Adverse Inference Sanctions for Plaintiff: eDiscovery Case Law

In NuVasive, Inc. v. Madsen Med., Inc., No. 13cv2077 BTM(RBB) (S.D. Cal. July 22, 2015), California Chief District Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz granted the defendants’ motion for adverse inference sanctions for failure to preserve text messages from four custodial employees that were key to the case.

Case Background

In this contractual dispute, the defendants sought sanctions in the form of an adverse inference jury instruction for the plaintiff’s failure to preserve evidence, specifically, text messages from four employees.  The defendants contended that these text messages could have been evidence of secret coordination between the plaintiff and former employees of the defendants to effect the termination of the defendants’ contractual relationship with the plaintiff and then have the plaintiff hire the defendants’ sales personnel as its own employees.

With regard to the four employees, each had a different level of failure to preserve the text messages.  One former employee turned over his current phone for imaging instead of the phone used during the relevant time period, which he wiped clean before turning it over to his son. A second employee was not asked to turn in his phone until 2014 (after being notified of a litigation hold in August 2012 and again in September 2013) and when he did, all text messages prior to September 20, 2012 were missing (which the plaintiff attributed to an iPhone iOS 6 software update released on September 19, 2012). The third employee had his phone wiped when he turned it in for an upgrade on two separate occasions, pursuant to company policy.  The fourth employee did not provide the phone he used in 2012 until sometime in 2013 and testified that he may have deleted some relevant messages.

Judge’s Ruling

Judge Moskowitz stated that “In light of all of the text messages that were lost or deleted, the Court concludes that NuVasive was at fault for not enforcing compliance with the litigation hold. Although it is true that Defendants should have taken steps to preserve the text messages of Orlando and Kordonowy while they were still working for MMI, NuVasive still had a duty to preserve the evidence and failed to do so.”

Rejecting the plaintiff’s claims that the defendants had obtained most of the deleted/lost text messages through other individuals, Judge Moskowitz also found that “Defendants have made a sufficient showing of prejudice”, noting from other texts that the defendants provided that it could “reasonably be inferred from these texts, viewed together with other evidence, that the MMI sales representatives were talking to NuVasive about plans to terminate MMI and have the sales representatives work directly for NuVasive. Accordingly, texts during the relevant time period to or from Moore, Kordonowy, Graubart, and Orlando might have furthered MMI’s claims.”

As a result, Judge Moskowitz found that “a properly tailored adverse inference instruction is appropriate and will not cause ‘substantial unfairness’ to NuVasive” and decided to give the following instruction:

“NuVasive has failed to prevent the destruction of evidence for MMI’s and Ms. Madsen’s use in this litigation after its duty to preserve the evidence arose. After considering all of the pertinent facts and circumstances, you may, but are not obligated to, infer that the evidence destroyed was favorable to MMI and unfavorable to NuVasive.”

Judge Moskowitz denied the defendants’ request for attorney’s fees and costs “because Defendants were also partially at fault for not taking steps to preserve text messages of Kordonowy and Orlando while they were still working for MMI.”

So, what do you think?  Was the sanction appropriate for this case?  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 Forecast is for Way More Clouds by 2018: eDiscovery Trends

According to a new Gartner report released earlier this month, by 2018, at least 30% of the data reviewed in eDiscovery will be stored in the cloud, up from 5% this year.

The report, titled “Critical Capabilities for E-Discovery Software”, identifies six critical capabilities and three use cases to provide detailed ranking on software products from 20 eDiscovery vendors.  Other key findings include:

  • Not surprisingly, there is a disconnection between IT and legal and, as a result, “[e]ach e-discovery case is often an isolated event and handled as a project”. This project-based approach means that “organizations invest in multiple tools and providers for their e-discovery technology needs”.
  • The eDiscovery market is still “relatively mature”, but “still faces a new wave of first-time buyers as litigation and investigation impact more and more nonregulated industries”.
  • The current market “lacks effective and cohesive technologies” to address new data sources (such as social media and other Web data) in collection and preservation.

The report recommends creating an eDiscovery stakeholder group which consists of IT, inside counsel, risk and security leaders to oversee projects, seek to identify eDiscovery tools and/or manual processes now in use by both IT and legal and consolidate solutions where overlapping capabilities may exist.

The Critical Capabilities document uses the same criteria for vendor inclusion as the “Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Software” report released by Gartner earlier this year (and covered by us here).  The report ranks the vendors for each of the three use cases, provides a table showing the product score for each vendor for both the three use cases and six critical capabilities and also provides a written summary of each vendor’s capabilities.

To learn more about the report and purchase a copy, click here.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised by the trend toward cloud-based eDiscovery review?  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.

A Long Time Litigation Support Professional Gets a Deserved Recognition: eDiscovery Trends

When people ask me how long I’ve been working in the litigation support/eDiscovery industry, I generally tell them “25+ years” (after 25, I just stopped counting).  But, there is someone who has been a litigation support professional for over 40(!) years, who recently received a well-deserved recognition for her work over the years.  Her name is Robin Athlyn Thompson.

Earlier this month, Robin, who is VP of Marketing at BIA, received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists (ACEDS).  In the press release announcing her award, Susan Kavanagh, Director of Client & Member Services for ACEDS was quoted as saying “No one can dispute Robin’s fiercely loyal commitment to innovation, creativity and the continued progression of eDiscovery, which is why she is the perfect recipient for this first ever ACEDS Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Robin was nominated for the award by her peers who noted, among other things, her service to the profession, her dedication to multiple industry associations, and her never ending drive to provide one of the best educational programs available, including the industry’s first cyclical education series.

In the past year, Robin also received the Silver Lifetime Achievement Award for her service to the eDiscovery, Information Governance and Records Management communities from The Stevies, a group which honors women in business.

An interview with Robin is available on the ACEDS site, where Robin talks about the award and also her thoughts about where the industry is heading.

Despite the serious look in the picture above, every time I’ve been around Robin, she has been smiling and is very personable and delightful to talk to, and I don’t think the award could have gone to a better person.  Congratulations, Robin!

So, what do you think? Do you know Robin?  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.