Close
Enter your
text here

Social Technology

eDiscovery Trends: Craig Ball of Craig D. Ball, P.C.
 

This is the ninth (and final) of the LegalTech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series.  eDiscoveryDaily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year and asked each of them the same three questions:

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Craig Ball.  Craig is a prolific contributor to continuing legal and professional education programs throughout the United States, having delivered over 600 presentations and papers.  Craig’s articles on forensic technology and electronic discovery frequently appear in the national media, including in American Bar Association, ATLA and American Lawyer Media print and online publications.  He also writes a monthly column on computer forensics and e-discovery for Law Technology News called "Ball in your Court," honored as both the 2007 and 2008 Gold Medal honoree as “Best Regular Column” as awarded by Trade Association Business Publications International.  It’s also the 2009 Gold and 2007 Silver Medalist honoree of the American Society of Business Publication Editors as “Best Contributed Column” and their 2006 Silver Medalist honoree as “Best Feature Series” and “Best Contributed Column.””  The presentation, "PowerPersuasion: Craig Ball on PowerPoint," is consistently among the top rated continuing legal educational programs from coast-to-coast.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

Price compression is a major trend.  Consumers are very slowly waking up to the fact that they have been the “drunken sailors on leave” in terms of how they have approached eDiscovery and there have been many “vendors of the night” ready to roll them for their paychecks.  eDiscovery has been more like a third world market where vendors have said “let’s ask for some crazy number” and perhaps they’ll be foolish enough to pay it.  And, if they don’t pay that one, let’s hit them with a little lower number, mention sanctions, give them a copy of something from Judge Scheindlin or Judge Grimm and then try again.  Until finally, they are so dissolved in a pool of their own urine that they’re willing to pay an outrageous price.  Those days are coming to an end and smart vendors are going to be prepare to be able to demonstrate the value and complexity behind their offerings.

I am seeing people recognizing that the “gravy train” is over except for the most egregious challenging eDiscovery situations where numbers really have little meaning.  When you’re talking about tens of thousands of employees and petabytes of data, the numbers can get astronomical.  But, for the usual case, with a more manageable number of custodians and issues, people are waking up to the fact that we can’t keep reinventing this wheel of great expense, so clients are pushing for more rational approaches and a few forward thinking vendors are starting to put forward some products will allow you to quantify what your exposure is going to be in eDiscovery.  We’re just not going to see per GB processing prices that are going to be measured in the double and triple digits – that just can’t go, at least when you’re talking about the raw data on the input side.  So, I’m seeing some behind the firewall products, even desktop products, that are going to be able to allow lawyers and people with relatively little technical expertise to handle small and medium sized cases.  Some of the hosting services are putting together pricing where, though I haven’t really tested them in real world situations, are starting to sound rational and less frightening.

I’m continuing to see more fragmentation in the market and I would like to see more integrated products, but it’s still like packaging a rather motley crew of different pieces that don’t always fit together well at all.  You’ve got relatively new review tools, some strong players like Clearwell and stronger than they used to be players like Relativity.  You’ve got people “from down under” that are really changing the game like Nuix.  And, you’ve got some upstarts – products that we’ve really not yet heard of at all.  I’m seeing at this conference that any one of them has the potential of becoming an industry standard.  I’m seeing some real innovation, some real new code bases coming out and that is impressive to me because it just hadn’t been happening before, it’s been “old wine in new bottles” for several years.

I also see some new ideas in collection.  I think people are starting to embrace what George Socha would like for me to aptly call the left side of the EDRM.  A lot of people have turned their heads away from the ugly business of selecting data to process and the collection of it and forensic and chain of custody issues and would gather it up any way they liked and process it.  But, I think there are some new and very viable ways that companies are offering for self-collection, for tracking of collection, for desk side interviews, and for generation and management of legal holds.  We’re seeing a lot of things emerging on that front.  Most of what I see in the legal hold management space is just awful.  That doesn’t mean it’s all awful, but most of it is awful.  It’s a lot of marketing speak, a lot of industry jargon, wrapped around a very uncreative, somewhat impractical, set of tools.  The question really is, are these things really much better than a well designed spreadsheet?  Certainly, they’re more scalable, but some have a “rushed to market” feel to me and I think it’s going to take them some time to mature.  Everyone is jumping on this Pension Committee bandwagon that Judge Scheindlin created for us, and not everyone has brought their Sunday best.

As for social media, it is a big deal because, if you’re paying attention to what’s happening with the generation about to explode on the scene, they simply have marginalized email.  Just as we are starting to get our arms around email, it’s starting to move off center stage.  And, I think the most important contribution to eDiscovery in 2010 has occurred silently and with little fanfare and I’d like to make sure you mention it.  In November, Facebook, the most important social networking site on the planet, very quietly provided the ability for you to package and collect, for personal storage, the entire contents of your Facebook life, including your Wall, your messaging, and your Facemail.  For all of the pieces of your Facebook existence, you can simply click and receive it back in a Zip file.  The ability to preserve and, ultimately, reopen and process that data is the most forward thinking thing that has emerged from the social networking world since there has been a social networking world.  How wonderful that Facebook had the foresight to say “you know, it would be nice if we could give people their entire Facebook stuff in a neat package in a moment in time”.

None of the others have done that yet, but I think that Facebook is so important that it’s going to make that a standard.  It’s going to need to be in Google Apps, it’s going to need to be in Gmail.  If you’re going to live your life “in the cloud”, then you’re going to have to have a way to grab your life from the cloud and move it somewhere else.  Maybe their portability was a way to head off antitrust, for all I know.  Whatever their motivation, I don’t think that most lawyers know that there is essentially this one-click preservation of Facebook.  If a vendor did it, you would hear about it in the elevators here at the show.  Facebook did it for free, and without any fanfare, and it’s an important thing for you to get out there.  The vendor that comes out with a tool that processes these packages that emerge, especially if they announce it when the Oscars come out {laugh}, is well positioned.

So, yes, social networking is important because it means that a lot of things change, forensics change.  You’re just not going to be able to do media forensics anymore on cloud content.  The cloud is going to make eDiscovery simpler, and that’s the one thing I haven’t heard anybody say, because you’ll have less you’ll need to delete and it’s much more likely to be gone – really gone – when you delete it (no forensics needed).  Collection and review can be easier.  What would you rather search, Gmail or Outlook?  Not only can Outlook emails be in several places, but the quality of a Google-based search is better, even though it’s not built for eDiscovery.  If I’m going to stand up in court and say that “I searched all these keywords and I saw all of the communications related to these keywords”, I’d rather do it with the force of Google than with the historically “snake bitten” engine for search that’s been in Outlook.  We always say in eDiscovery that you don’t use Outlook as a review and search tool because we know it isn’t good.  So, we take the container files, PSTs and OSTs and we parse them in better tools.  I think we’ll be able to do it both ways. 

I foresee a day not long off when Google will allow either the repatriation of those collections for use in more powerful tools or will allow different types of searches to be run on the Gmail collections other than just Gmail search.  You may be able to do searches and collect from your own Gmail, to place a hold on that Gmail.  Right now, you’d have to collect it, tag it, move it to a folder – you have to do some gyrations.  I think it will mature and they may open their API, so that there can be add-on tools from the lab or from elsewhere that will allow people to hook into Gmail.  To a degree, you can do that right now, by paying an upgrade fee for Postini, where they can download a PST with your Gmail content.  The problem with that is that Gmail is structured data, you really need to see the threading that Gmail provides to really appreciate the conversation that is Gmail.  Whereas, if you pull it down to PST (except in the latest version of Outlook, which I think 2010 does a pretty good job of threading), I don’t know if that is replicated in the Postini PST.  I’ll have to test that.

Office 2010 is a trend, as well.  Outlook 2010 is the first Microsoft tool that is eDiscovery friendly, by design.  I think Exchange 2010 is going to make our lives easier in eDiscovery.  We’re going to have a lot more “deleted” information hang around in the Windows 7 environment and in the Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 environment.  Data is not going away until you jump through some serious hoops to make it go away.

I think the iPad is also going to have quite an impact.  At first, it will be smoke and mirrors, but before 2011 bids us goodbye, I think the iPad is going to find its way into some really practical, gestural interfaces for working with data in eDiscovery.  I’ve yet to see anything yet but a half-assed version of an app.  Everyone rushed out and you wanted some way to interface with your product, but they didn’t build a purpose-built app for the iPad to really take advantage of its strengths, to be able to gesturally move between screens.  I foresee a day where you’ll have a ring of designations around the screen and you’ll flip a document, like a privileged document, into the appropriate designation and it will light up or something so that you know it went into the correct bin – as if you were at a desk and you were moving paper to different parts of the desk.  Sometimes, I wonder why somebody hasn’t thought of this before.  I’ve done no metrics, I’ve done no ergonomic studies to know that the paper metaphor serves the task well.  But, my gut tells me that we need to teach lawyers to walk before they can run, to help them interact with data in a metaphor that they understand in a graphical user interface.  Point and click, drag and drop, pinch and stretch, which are three dimensional concepts translated into a two dimensional interface. The interface of the iPad is so intuitive that a three year old could figure it out.  Just like Windows Explorer impacted the design of so many applications (“it’s an Explorer-like interface”), the iPad will do the same.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the second afternoon of LTNY}  I think that the show felt well attended, upbeat, fresher that it has in two years.  I give the credit to the vendors showing up with some genuinely new products, instead of renamed, remarketed new products, although there’s still plenty of that.  There were so many announcements of new products before the show that you really wonder how new is this product?  But, there were some that really look like they were built from the ground up and that’s impressive.  There’s some money being spent on development again, and that’s positive.  The traffic was better, I’m glad we finally eliminated the loft area of the exhibit hall that would get so hot and uncomfortable.  I thought the traffic flow was very difficult in a positive way, which is to say that there were a lot of warm bodies out there, walking and talking and looking.

Henry Dicker and his team should be congratulated and I wouldn’t be surprised if they set a record over the past several years at this show.  The budgets were showing, money was freed up and that’s a positive for everyone in this industry.  Also, the quality of the questions being put forward in the educational tracks are head and shoulders better, more incisive and insightful and more advanced.  We’re starting to see the results of people working at the “201 level”, but we still don’t have enough technologists here, it’s still way too lawyer heavy.  This is the New York market, everybody is chasing after the Fortune 500, but everything has to be downward scalable too.  A good show.

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

The first week of June, I’m going to be teaching a technology for lawyers and litigation support professionals academy with an ultra all star cast of a very small, but dedicated faculty, including Michael Arkfeld, Judge Paul Grimm, Judge John Facciola, and others.  It’s called the eDiscovery Training Academy and will be held at the Georgetown Law School. It’s going to be rigorous, challenging, extremely technical and the hope is that the people emerge from that week genuinely equipped to talk the talk and walk the walk of productive 26(f) conferences and real interaction with IT personnel and records managers.  We’re going to start down at the surface of the magnetic media and we’re going to keep climbing until we can climb no further.

Thanks, Craig, 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!

eDiscovery Trends: Deidre Paknad of PSS Systems
 

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

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Deidre Paknad.  Deidre is President & CEO of PSS Systems, an IBM Company.  Deidre is widely credited with having conceived of and launched the first commercial applications for legal holds, collections and retention management in 2004. A well-known thought leader in the legal and information governance domain, Deidre founded the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC), a professional community on retention and preservation that analyst firm IDC labeled a "think tank." She has been a member of several Sedona working groups since 2005 and leads the EDRM Information Management Reference Model (IMRM) working group.  Deidre is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with 20 years' experience applying technology to poor-functioning business processes to reduce cost and risk. Prior to PSS, she helped Certus launch its Sarbanes Oxley software solution. Deidre previously founded and was CEO of CoVia Technologies from 1996 to 2000, where she was inducted into the Smithsonian Institution for innovation in 1999 and again in 2000.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

Well, certainly the social media explosion is one of the most talked about current trends.  Social media has brought about a huge change in the way we communicate, both personally and within organizations.  It’s one of the factors that is causing organizations to revisit where information comes from, where “messages” come from.  And, now there are more communications via social media than email.  In 2010, there were an estimated 1 trillion emails sent worldwide, but 89% of all emails sent is spam, so the number of “true emails” is far less, only about 110 billion.  Conversely, there were nearly 400 billion Facebook communications last year, over 700 billion views on YouTube and over 200 billion Twitter messages.  Organizations will have to face forward in addressing new sources of data and how to handle them as there will continue to be more social media communications (many viewed via mobile devices) with customers, employees, etc.  While most corporate social media tools today aren’t “discovery ready”, social and mobile media may level the information playing field between small and large litigants.

Another trend on which organizations are finally focusing more, that has been a significant focus of mine for some time, is information governance.  Since the Federal evidence rules were extended to electronic data in 2006, preservation sanctions are at an all-time high, despite the fact that organizations have adopted a mindset of “save everything”, which has led to unrestrained growth in data within organizations.  So, saving more data did not translate to less risk for organizations, but it did translate to more cost.  As noted in the 2009 Fulbright & Jaworski Litigation Report, the average cost to collect, cull and review information per case for large organizations has risen to $3 million, but the amount of that reviewed data that needed to be retained was only 30% and 70% was wasteful legal effort.   Even worse, organizations are spending 3.5% of revenues on information management – for the Fortune 50, that’s several billion dollars and a good chunk of it goes to managing unnecessary information and infrastructure.

Last year, the CGOC conducted a survey of legal, records management (RIM) and IT practitioners in Global 1000 companies and published the findings in an October report titled Information Governance Benchmark Report in Global 1000 Companies (You can request a copy of the report here and read eDiscovery Daily’s blog post about it here.).  75% of respondents identified the inability to defensibly dispose of data as their greatest challenge, and 70% of respondents indicated that they depend on “liaisons and people glue” to link discovery and regulatory obligations to information.  It’s an enterprise issue where Legal understands the obligations for data, business teams know the information value of the data and IT has the data, but no visibility to its obligations or business value.  So, there’s a big disconnect.

I think you’ll see that information governance and eDiscovery in general will become more connected to the overall business strategy.  When asked what they believe are the essential elements of information governance, 77% agreed retention schedules that reflect both regulatory and business needs and 85% of respondents agreed consistent collaboration and systematic linkage across legal, records and IT and were essential elements.  I think the Information Governance Benchmark Report has opened some eyes as to the importance of associating the legal obligations for and value of information to the assets IT is managing and the benefits of connecting legal, records and IT stakeholders and processes as an essential corporate strategy.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the second afternoon of LTNY}  I think there’s some “retreading” of topics at this year’s show, for example, the Legal vs. IT keynote speech.  That’s really more of an issue for 2 or 3 years ago.  Legal and IT do collaborate narrowly on discovery responsiveness.  But the issues of the day are more at an overall company level – high costs and high risk associated with the unrestrained growth in data are caused by practices across the company, not just in the legal department.   Responding to discovery simply deals with the symptoms, but doesn’t treat the disease.

I think discussion about FRCP reform aimed at easing the burden of discovery is more timely and survey data from the CGOC community published in the legal holds and information governance benchmark reports provided evidence in the FRCP Preservation Comment of November 10, 2010 of the need to reshape the rules to reflect current needs.

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

Well, in addition to the significant reception that the information governance benchmark report has received, CGOC just conducted its 2011 Summit last month, with participation from a number of large corporations including Exxon Mobil, Travelers, Bank of America and Novartis.  The Summit included a number of presentations, and a mock discovery hearing conducted by Judge {Andrew J.} Peck {Magistrate Judge, SDNY} on how prevailing practices break down in cases like Harkabi where everyone took the right steps but still got the wrong results.  It also included breakout sessions for Legal, RIM and IT to discuss prevailing practices for discovery, retention and data disposal, improving processes within each of these departments to support the enterprise as well as starting and advancing the cross-functional dialogue between the departments.

I’m also very excited about the IMRM project within EDRM, a group I co-chair.  It aims to offer guidance and a responsibility framework for Legal, IT, Records Management, line-of-business leaders and other business stakeholders within organizations.  It’s an entirely new reference model that is a separate counterpart to EDRM and the model links the duty and value to information assets to result in efficient and effective management of information.

There is nothing I’m more excited about, however, than working with my new colleagues at IBM on solutions that help our customers to do rigorous, efficient eDiscovery, value-based retention, smarter archiving and defensible disposal. 

Thanks, Deidre, 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!

eDiscovery Trends: Jack Halprin of Autonomy
 

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

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Jack Halprin.  As Vice President, eDiscovery and Compliance with Autonomy, Jack serves as internal and external legal subject matter expert for best practices and defensible processes around litigation, electronic discovery, legal hold, and compliance issues. He speaks frequently on enterprise legal risk management, compliance, and eDiscovery at industry events and seminars, and has authored numerous articles on eDiscovery, legal hold, social media, and knowledge management. He is actively involved in The Sedona Conference, ACC, and Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). With a BA in Chemistry from Yale University, a JD from the University of California-Los Angeles, and certifications from the California, Connecticut, Virginia and Patent Bars, Mr. Halprin has varied expertise that lends itself well to both the legal and technical aspects of electronic discovery collection and preservation.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

If I look at the overall trends, social media and the cloud are probably the two hottest topics from a technology perspective and also a data management perspective.  From the legal perspective, you’re looking at preservation issues and sanctions as well as the idea of proportionality.  You also see a greater need for technology that can meet the needs of attorneys and understand the meaning of information.  More and more, everyone is realizing that keyword searches are lacking – they aren’t really as effective as everyone thinks they are.

We’re also starting to see two other technology related trends.  The industry is consolidating and customers are really starting to look for a single platform.  The current process of importing/exporting of data from storage to legal hold collection, to early case assessment, to review, to production and creating several extra copies of the documents in the process is not manageable going forward.  Customers want to be able to preserve in place, to analyze in place, and they don’t want to have to collect and duplicate the data again and again.  If you look at the left side of EDRM, the more proactive side, they don’t want put data or documents in a special repository unless it’s a true record that no one needs to access on a regular basis.  They want to work with active data where it lives.

You’ll see a reduction in the number of vendors in the next year or two, and the technology will not only be able to handle the current data sources, but the increased data volumes and new types of data we’re seeing.  Everyone is looking at social media and saying “how are we going to handle this”, when it’s really just another data source that has to be addressed.  Yes, it’s challenging because there is so much of it and it is even more conversational than email, taking it to a whole new level, but it’s really no different from other data sources.  A keyword search on a social media site is not going to net you the results you’re looking for, but conceptual search to understand the context of what people mean will help you identify the relevant information.  Growth rates are predicted at more than 60 percent for unstructured information, but social media is growing at a much faster clip.  A lot of people are looking at social media and moving to the cloud to manage this data, reducing some of the infrastructure costs, taking strain off the network and reducing their IT footprint.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the first afternoon of LTNY}  I’ll take it first from the Autonomy perspective.  We have social media solutions, which we’ve had for our marketing business (Interwoven) for some time.  We’ve also had social media governance technology for quite some time as well, and we announced today new capabilities for identifying, preserving and collecting social media for eDiscovery, which is part of and builds on our end-to-end solution.  I haven’t spent much time on the floor yet, but based on everything I’ve seen in the eDiscovery space, a lot of people are talking about social media, but no one really understands how to address it.  You’ve got people scraping {social media} pages, but if you scrape the page without the active link or without capturing the context behind it, you’re missing the wealth of the information.  We’re taking a different approach, we take the entire page, including the context and active links.

There’s also a wide disparity in terms of the cloud.  Is it public?  Is it private?  How much control do you have over your data when it’s in the cloud?  You’ve got a lot of vendors out there that aren’t transparent about their data centers.  You’ve got vendors that say they’re SAS 70 Type II certified, but it’s their data center, not the vendor itself, that is certified.  So, who’s got the experience?  Every year at LegalTech, there are probably forty new vendors out there and the next year, half or more of them are gone.

As for the tone of the show, I think it’s certainly more upbeat than last year when attendance was down, and it’s a bit more “bouncy” this year.  With that in mind, you’ll continue to see acquisitions and you’ll have the issue companies merged through acquisition using different technologies and different search engines, meaning they’re not on a single platform and not really a single solution.  So, that gets back to the idea that customers are really looking for a single platform with a single engine underneath it.  That’s how we approach it, and I think others are trying to get to that point, but I don’t think there are many vendors there yet.  That’s where the trend is heading.

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

In addition to the new social media eDiscovery capabilities described above, we’ve announced the Autonomy Chaining Console, which is a dashboard to provide corporate legal departments with greater visibility and defensibility across the entire process and to eliminate those risky data import/export handoffs through each step.  Many of the larger corporations have hundreds of cases, dozens of outside law firms, and terabytes of data to manage.  The process today is very “silo” oriented – data is sent to processing vendors, it is sent to law firms, etc.  So, you get these “weak links in the chain” where data can get lost and risks of spoliation and costs increase.  Autonomy announced the whole idea of chaining last year promoting the idea that we can seamlessly connect law firms and their corporate clients in a secure manner, so that the law firm can login to a secure portal and can manage the data that they’re allowed to access.  The Chaining Console strengthens that capability, and it adds Autonomy IDOL’s ability to understand meaning and allows corporate and outside counsel to look at the same data on the same solution.  It uses IDOL to determine potential custodians, understand fact patterns and identify other companies that may be involved by really analyzing the data and providing an understanding of what’s there.  It can also monitor and track risk, so you can set up certain policies around key issues; for example, insider trading, securities fraud, FCPA, etc.  Using those policies, it can alert you to the risks that are there and possibly identify the custodians that are engaging in risky behavior.  And, of course, it tracks the data from start to finish, giving corporate counsel, legal IT, IT, litigation support, litigation counsel as well as outside counsel a single view of the data on a single dashboard.  It strengthens our message and takes us to the next step in really providing the end-to-end platform for our clients.

We’ve also announced iManage in the cloud for legal information management in the cloud.  The cloud-based Information Management platform combines WorkSite, Records Manager, Universal Search, Process Automation and ConflictsManager to help attorneys manage the content throughout the matter lifecycle from inception to disposition.  It uses IDOL’s ability to group concepts, so if you have a conflict with Apple, it knows that you’re searching for terms related to Apple computer such as Mac, iPhone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Jonathon Ives and understands that these are related terms and individuals.  And, we’ve just announced the cloud-based version of that.  We’re already managing information governance in the cloud for a lot of our clients and the platform leverages our private cloud, which is the world’s largest private cloud with over 17 petabytes of data.

And, then we have a market leadership announcement with additional major law firms that are using our solutions, such as Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP, Brown Rudnick LLP, Fennemore Craig, etc.  So, we have four press releases with new developments at Autonomy that we’ve announced here at the show.

Thanks, Jack, 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!

eDiscovery Trends: Alon Israely, Esq., CISSP of BIA
 

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

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Alon Israely.  Alon is a Senior Advisor in BIA’s Advisory Services group and when he’s not advising clients on e-discovery issues he works closely with BIA’s product development group for its core technology products.  Alon has over fifteen years of experience in a variety of advanced computing-related technologies and has consulted with law firms and their clients on a variety of technology issues, including expert witness services related to computer forensics, digital evidence management and data security.

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery on which people in the industry are, or should be, focused?

I think one of the important trends for corporate clients and law firms is cost control, whether it’s trying to minimize the amount of project management hours that are being billed or the manner in which the engagement is facilitated.  I’m not suggesting going full-bore necessarily, but taking baby steps to help control costs is a good approach.  I don’t think it’s only about bringing prices down, because I think that the industry in general has been able to do that naturally well.  But, I definitely see a new focus on the manner in which costs are managed and outsourced.  So, very specifically, scoping correctly is key, making sure you’re using the right tool for the right job, keeping efficiencies (whether that’s on the vendor side or the client side) by doing things such as not having five phone calls for a meeting to figure out what the key words are for field searching or just going out and imaging every drive before deciding what’s really needed. Bringing simple efficiencies to the mechanics of doing e-discovery saves tons of money in unnecessary legal, vendor and project management fees.  You can do things that are about creating efficiencies, but are not necessarily changing the process or changing the pricing.

I also see trends in technology, using more focused tools and different tools to facilitate a single project.  Historically, parties would hire three or four different vendors for a single project, but today it may be just one or two vendors or maybe even no vendors, (just the law firm) but, it’s the use of the right technologies for the right situations – maybe not just one piece of software, but leveraging several for different parts of the process.  Overall, I foresee fewer vendors per project, but more vendors increasing their stable of tools.  So, whereas a vendor may have had a review tool and one way of doing collection, now they may have two or three review tools, including an ECA tool, and one or two ways of doing collections. They have a toolkit from which they can choose the best set of tools to bring to the engagement.  Because they have more tools to market, vendors can have the right tool in-their-back-pocket whereas before the tool belonged to just one service provider so you bought from them, or you just didn’t have it.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the first morning of LTNY} I think you have either a little or a lot of – depending on how aggressive I want to be with my opinion – that there seems to be a disconnect between what they’re speaking about in the panels and what we’re seeing on the floor.  But, I think that’s OK in that the conference itself, is usually a little bit ahead of the curve with respect to topics, and the technology will catch up.  You have topics such as predictive coding and social networking related issues – those are two big ones that you’ll see.  I think, for example, there are very few companies that have a solution for social networking, though we happen to have one.  And, predictive coding is the same scenario.  You have a lot of providers that talk about it, but you have a handful that actually do it, and you have probably even fewer than that who do it right.  I think that next year you’ll see many predictive coding solutions and technologies and many more tools that have that capability built into them.  So, on the conference side, there is one level of information and on the floor side, a different level.

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

BIA has a new product called TotalDiscovery.com, the industry’s first SaaS (software-as-a-service), on-demand collection technology that provides defensible collections.  We just rolled it out, we’re introducing it here at LegalTech and we’re starting a technology preview and signing up people who want to use the application or try it.  It’s specifically for attorneys, corporations, service providers – anyone who’s in the business and needs a tool for defensible data collection performed with agility (always hard to balance) – so without having to buy software or have expert training, users simply login or register and can start immediately.  You don’t have to worry about the traditional business processes to get things set up and started.  Which, if you think about it on the collections side of e-discovery it means that  the client’s CEO or VP of Marketing can call you up and say “I’m leaving, I have my PST here, can you just come get it?” and you can facilitate that process through the web, download an application, walk through a wizard, collect it defensibly, encrypt it and then deliver a filtered set, as needed, for review..

The tool is designed to collect defensibly and to move the collected data – or some subset of that data –to delivery, from there you would select your review tool of choice and we hand it off to the selected review tool.  So, we’re not trying to be everything, we’re focused on automating the left side of the EDRM.  We have loads to certain tools, having been a service provider for ten years, and we’re connecting with partners so that we can do the handoff, so when the client says “I’m ready to deliver my data”, they can choose OnDemand or Concordance or another review tool, and then either directly send it or the client can download and ship it.  We’re not trying to be a review tool and not trying to be an ECA tool that helps you find the needle in the haystack; instead, we’re focused on collecting the data, normalizing it, cataloguing it and handing if off for the attorneys to do their work.

Thanks, Alon, 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!

eDiscovery Trends: Tom Gelbmann of Gelbmann & Associates, LLC
 

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

  1. What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery that people in the industry are, or should be, focused on?
  2. Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?
  3. What are you working on that you’d like our readers to know about?

Today’s thought leader is Tom Gelbmann. Tom is Principal of Gelbmann & Associates, LLC, co-author of the Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey and co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).  Since 1993, Gelbmann & Associates, LLC has helped law firms and Corporate Law Departments realize the full benefit of their investments in Information Technology.  As today is Valentine’s Day, consider this interview with Tom as eDiscoveryDaily’s Valentine’s Day present to you!

What do you consider to be the current significant trends in eDiscovery that people in the industry are, or should be, focused on?

The first thing that comes to mind is the whole social media thing, which is something you’re probably getting quite a bit of (in your interviews), but with the explosion of the use of social media, personally and within organizations, we’re seeing a huge explosion (in eDiscovery).  One of the issues is that there is very little in terms of policy and management around that, and I look at it in a very similar vein to the late ’80s and early ‘90s when electronic mail came about and there were no real defining guidelines.  It wasn’t until we got to a precipitating event where “all of a sudden, organizations get religion” and say “oh my god, we better have a policy for this”.  So, I think the whole social media thing is one issue.

On top of that, another area that is somewhat of an umbrella to all this is information management and EDRM with the Information Management Reference Model (IMRM) is certainly part of that. What is important in this context is that corporations are beginning to realize the more they get their “electronic house in order”, the better off they’re going to be in many ways.  Less cost, less embarrassment and so forth.

The third thing is that, and this is something that I’ve been tracking for awhile, the growth in tools and solutions available for small organizations and small cases.  For a long time, everything was about millions of documents and gigabytes of data – that’s what got the headlines and that what the service bureaus and providers were focusing on.  The real “gold” in my mind is the small cases, the hundreds of thousands of small cases that are out there.  The providers that can effectively reach that market in a cost-effective way will be positioned very well and I think we’re starting to see that happen.  And, I think the whole “cloud” concept of technology is helping that.

Which of those trends are evident here at LTNY, which are not being talked about enough, and/or what are your general observations about LTNY this year?

{Interviewed on the first afternoon of the show} Well, so far it’s been a blur [laughs].  But, I think we’re definitely seeing social media as a big issue at this LegalTech and I also think we’re seeing more solutions toward the smaller cases and smaller organizations here at this year’s show.

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

From an EDRM standpoint, I just came from a meeting for the EDRM Testing pilot project.  Last fall, at the mid-year meeting, there was a groundswell to address testing, and the basic issue is applying some principles of testing to software products associated with electronic discovery to answer the question of “how do you know?” when the court asks if the results are true and what sort of testing process did you go through.  There is very little as far as a testing regimen or even guidelines on a testing regimen for electronic discovery software and so the EDRM testing group is looking to establish some guidelines, starting very basically looking at bands of rigor associated with bands of risk.  So, you will see that at this year’s EDRM annual meeting in May that EDRM Testing will become a full-fledged project.

And the other thing that I’m happy to announce is that George Socha and I have launched a web site called Apersee, which is the next step in the evolution of the (Socha-Gelbmann) rankings.  We killed the rankings two years ago because they were being misused.  Consumers wanted to know who do I send the RFP to, who do I engage and they would almost mindlessly send to the Socha-Gelbmann Top Ten.  But, now the consumers can specify what they’re looking for, starting with areas of the model, whether it’s Collection, Preservation, Review, etc., and provide other information such as geography and types of ESI and what will be returned on those searches is a list of providers with those services or products.  We have right now about 800 providers in the database and many of those have very basic listings at this point.  As this is currently in beta, we have detailed information that we pre-populated for about 200 providers and are expanding rapidly.  Over the next couple of months, we’re working hard with providers to populate their sites with whatever content is appropriate to describe their products and services in terms of what they do, where they do it, etc., that can feed the search engine.  And, we have been getting very good feedback from both the consumer side and the provider side as being a very valuable service.

Thanks, Tom, for participating in the interview!

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

Deadline Extended to Vote for the Most Significant eDiscovery Case of 2010
 

Our ‘little experiment’ to see what the readers of eDiscoveryDaily think about case law developments in 2010 needs more time as we have not yet received enough votes yet to have a statistically significant result.  So, we’ve extended the deadline to select the case with the most significant impact on eDiscovery practices in 2010 to February 28.  Evidently, calling out the vote on the last business day before LegalTech is not the best timing.  Live and learn!

As noted previously, we have “nominated” five cases, which we feel were the most significant in different issues of case law, including duty to preserve and sanctions, clawback agreements under Federal Rule of Evidence 502, not reasonably accessible arguments and discoverability of social media content.  If you feel that some other case was the most significant case of 2010, you can select that case instead.  Again, it’s very important to note that you can vote anonymously, so we’re not using this as a “hook” to get your information.  You can select your case without providing any personal information.  However, we would welcome your comments as to why you selected the case you did and you can – optionally – identify yourself as well.

To get more information about the nominated cases (as well as other significant cases), click here.  To cast your vote, click here.

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

Vote for the Most Significant eDiscovery Case of 2010!
 

Since it’s awards season, we thought we would get into the act from an eDiscovery standpoint.  Sure, you have Oscars, Emmys and Grammys – but what about “EDDies”?  (I’ll bet you wondered what Eddie Munster could possibly have to do with eDiscovery, didn’t you?)

So, we’re conducting a ‘little experiment’ to see what the readers of eDiscoveryDaily think about case law developments in 2010.  This is our first annual “EDDies” award to select the case with the most significant impact on eDiscovery practices in 2010.  No cash or prizes being awarded, or even a statuette, but a chance to see what the readers think was the most important case of the year from an eDiscovery standpoint.

We have “nominated” five cases below, which we feel were the most significant in different issues of case law, including duty to preserve and sanctions, clawback agreements under Federal Rule of Evidence 502, not reasonably accessible arguments and discoverability of social media content.  We have a link to review more information about each case, and a link at the bottom of this post to cast your vote.

Very Important!  You can vote anonymously, so we’re not using this as a “hook” to get your information.  You can click on the link at the bottom, select your case and be done with it.  However, we would welcome your comments as to why you selected the case you did and you can – optionally – identify yourself as well.  eDiscoveryDaily will publish selected comments to reflect opinion of the voters as well as the vote results on February 7.  Click here to cast your vote now!

So, here are the cases:

Duty to Preserve/Sanctions

  • The Pension Committee of the Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of America Securities, LLC, 29010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 4546 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 15, 2010) (as amended May 28, 2010) – “Pension Committee”: The case that defined negligence, gross negligence, and willfulness in the electronic discovery context and demonstrated the consequences (via sanctions) resulting from those activities.  Judge Shira Scheindlin titled her 85-page opinion “Zubulake Revisited: Six Years Later”.  For more on this case, click here.
  • Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 2010 WL 3530097 (D. Md. 2010) – “Victor Stanley II”: The case of “the gang that couldn’t spoliate straight” where one of the defendants faced imprisonment for up to 2 years (subsequently set aside on appeal) and the opinion included a 12 page chart delineating the preservation and spoliation standards in each judicial circuit.  For more on this case, click here and here.

Clawback Agreements

  • Rajala v. McGuire Woods LLP, 2010 WL 2949582 (D. Kan. July 22, 2010) – “Rajala”: The case that addressed the applicability of Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) and (e) for “clawback” provisions for inadvertently produced privileged documents.  For more on this case, click here.

Not Reasonably Accessible

  • Major Tours, Inc. v. Colorel, 2010 WL 2557250 (D.N.J. June 22, 2010) – “Major Tours”: The case that established a precedent that a party may obtain a Protective Order relieving it of the duty to access backup tapes, even when that party’s failure to issue a litigation hold caused the data not to be available via any other means.  For more on this case, click here.

Social Media Discovery

  • Crispin v. Christian Audigier Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 52832 (C.D. Calif. May 26, 2010) – “Crispin”: The case that used a 24 year old law (The Stored Communications Act of 1986) to address whether ‘private’ data on social networks is discoverable.  For more on this case, click here.

If you feel that some other case was the most significant case of 2010, you can select that case instead.  Other notable cases include:

  • Rimkus v. Cammarata, 2010 WL 645253 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 19, 2010): Where District Court Judge Lee Rosenthal examined spoliation laws of each of the 13 Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal.
  • Orbit One Communications Inc. v. Numerex Corp., 2010 WL 4615547 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 26, 2010): Magistrate Judge James C. Francis concluded that sanctions for spoliation must be based on the loss of at least some information relevant to the dispute (differing with “Pension Committee” in this manner).
  • DeGeer v. Gillis, 2010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 97457(N.D. Ill. Sept. 17, 2010): Demonstration of inadvertent disclosure made FRE 502(d) effective, negating waiver of privilege.
  • Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., 2010 WL 2640492 (D. Del. June 21, 2010): Defendants’ motion to compel the production of ESI for a period of 18 years was granted, with imposed cost-shifting.
  • E.E.O.C. v. Simply Storage Management, LLC, 2010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 52766 (S.D. Ind. May 11, 2010): EEOC is ordered to produce certain social networking communications.
  • McMillen v. Hummingbird Speedway, Inc., No. 113-2010 CD (C.P. Jefferson, Sept. 9, 2010): Motion to Compel discovery of social network account log-in names and passwords was granted.

Click here to cast your vote now!  Results will be published in eDiscoveryDaily on February 7.

The success of this ‘little experiment’ will determine whether next year there is a second annual “EDDies” award.  😉

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

eDiscovery Trends: Sanctions Down in 2010 — at least thru December 1

Recently, this blog cited a Duke Law Journal study that indicated that eDiscovery sanctions were at an all-time high through 2009.  Then, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a story recently from Williams Mullen recapping the 2010 year in eDiscovery.  It provides a very thorough recap including 2010 trends in sanctions (identifying several cases where sanctions were at issue), advances made during the year in cooperation and proportionality, challenges associated with privacy concerns in foreign jurisdictions and trends in litigation dealing with social media.  It’s a very comprehensive summary of the year in eDiscovery.

One noteworthy finding is that, according to the report, sanctions were sought and awarded in fewer cases in 2010.  Some notable stats from the report:

  • There were 208 eDiscovery opinions in 2009 versus 209 through December 1, 2010;
  • Out of 209 cases with eDiscovery opinions in 2010, sanctions were sought in 79 of them (38%) and awarded in 49 (62% of those cases, and 23% of all eDiscovery cases).
  • Compare that with 2009 when sanctions were sought in 42% of eDiscovery cases and were awarded in 70% of the cases in which they were requested (30% of all eDiscovery cases).
  • While overall requests for sanctions decreased, motions to compel more than doubled in 2010, being filed in 43% of all e-discovery cases, compared to 20% in 2009.
  • Costs and fees were by far the most common sanction, being awarded in 60% of the cases involving sanctions.
  • However, there was a decline in each type of sanction as costs and fees (from 33 to 29 total sanctions), adverse inference (13 to 7), terminating (10 to 7), additional discovery (10 to 6) and preclusion (5 to 3) sanctions all declined.

The date of this report was December 17, and the report noted a total of 209 eDiscovery cases as of December 1, 2010.  So, final tallies for the year were not yet tabulated.  It will be interesting to see if the trend in decline of sanctions held true once the entire year is considered.

So, what do you think?  Is this a significant indication that more organizations are getting a handle on their eDiscovery obligations – or just a “blip in the radar”?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Trends: 2011 Predictions — By The Numbers
 

Comedian Nick Bakay”>Nick Bakay always ends his Tale of the Tape skits where he compares everything from Married vs. Single to Divas vs. Hot Dogs with the phrase “It's all so simple when you break things down scientifically.”

The late December/early January time frame is always when various people in eDiscovery make their annual predictions as to what trends to expect in the coming year.  We’ll have some of our own in the next few days (hey, the longer we wait, the more likely we are to be right!).  However, before stating those predictions, I thought we would take a look at other predictions and see if we can spot some common trends among those, “googling” for 2011 eDiscovery predictions, and organized the predictions into common themes.  I found serious predictions here, here, here, here and here.  Oh, also here and here.

A couple of quick comments: 1) I had NO IDEA how many times that predictions are re-posted by other sites, so it took some work to isolate each unique set of predictions.  I even found two sets of predictions from ZL Technologies, one with twelve predictions and another with seven, so I had to pick one set and I chose the one with seven (sorry, eWEEK!). If I have failed to accurately attribute the original source for a set of predictions, please feel free to comment.  2) This is probably not an exhaustive list of predictions (I have other duties in my “day job”, so I couldn’t search forever), so I apologize if I’ve left anybody’s published predictions out.  Again, feel free to comment if you’re aware of other predictions.

Here are some of the common themes:

  • Cloud and SaaS Computing: Six out of seven “prognosticators” indicated that adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) “cloud” solutions will continue to increase, which will become increasingly relevant in eDiscovery.  No surprise here, given last year’s IDC forecast for SaaS growth and many articles addressing the subject, including a few posts right here on this blog.
  • Collaboration/Integration: Six out of seven “augurs” also had predictions related to various themes associated with collaboration (more collaboration tools, greater legal/IT coordination, etc.) and integration (greater focus by software vendors on data exchange with other systems, etc.).  Two people specifically noted an expectation of greater eDiscovery integration within organization governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) processes.
  • In-House Discovery: Five “pundits” forecasted eDiscovery functions and software will continue to be brought in-house, especially on the “left-side of the EDRM model” (Information Management).
  • Diverse Data Sources: Three “soothsayers” presaged that sources of data will continue to be more diverse, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, given the popularity of gadgets and the rise of social media.
  • Social Media: Speaking of social media, three “prophets” (yes, I’ve been consulting my thesaurus!) expect social media to continue to be a big area to be addressed for eDiscovery.
  • End to End Discovery: Three “psychics” also predicted that there will continue to be more single-source end-to-end eDiscovery offerings in the marketplace.

The “others receiving votes” category (two predicting each of these) included maturing and acceptance of automated review (including predictive coding), early case assessment moving toward the Information Management stage, consolidation within the eDiscovery industry, more focus on proportionality, maturing of global eDiscovery and predictive/disruptive pricing.

Predictive/disruptive pricing (via Kriss Wilson of Superior Document Services and Charles Skamser of eDiscovery Solutions Group respective blogs) is a particularly intriguing prediction to me because data volumes are continuing to grow at an astronomical rate, so greater volumes lead to greater costs.  Creativity will be key in how companies deal with the larger volumes effectively, and pressures will become greater for providers (even, dare I say, review attorneys) to price their services more creatively.

Another interesting prediction (via ZL Technologies) is that “Discovery of Databases and other Structured Data will Increase”, which is something I’ve expected to see for some time.  I hope this is finally the year for that.

Finally, I said that I found serious predictions and analyzed them; however, there are a couple of not-so-serious sets of predictions here and here.  My favorite prediction is from The Posse List, as follows: “LegalTech…renames itself “EDiscoveryTech” after Law.com survey reveals that of the 422 vendors present, 419 do e-discovery, and the other 3 are Hyundai HotWheels, Speedway Racers and Convert-A-Van who thought they were at the Javits Auto Show.”

So, what do you think?  Care to offer your own “hunches” from your crystal ball?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

eDiscovery Case Law: Crispin v. Christian Audigier Inc.

Yesterday, we took a look at “Major Tours, Inc. v. Colorel”, which addresses whether a party may obtain a Protective Order relieving it of the duty to access backup tapes, even when that party’s failure to issue a litigation hold resulted in the data only being available on those backup tapes.

Discoverability of social media content has been a big topic this year, with several cases addressing the issue, including this one, previously discussed on eDiscovery Daily.  The holiday week look back at cases concludes with Crispin v. Christian Audigier Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 52832 (C.D. Calif. May 26, 2010), which addresses whether ‘private’ data on social networks is discoverable.

This copyright infringement claim brought by artist Buckley Crispin against defendant and designer Christian Audigier, alleges that Audigier used artwork outside the scope of the original oral license between the parties and also sub-licensed the artwork to other companies and individuals (named as co-defendants) without Crispin’s consent.  The defendants served subpoenas on social media providers Facebook, MySpace, and Media Temple, directing them to turn over all communications between Crispin and Audigier, as well as any communications referencing the co-defendants.

Crispin sought to quash the subpoenas, arguing that they sought private electronic communications protected under the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), prohibiting Electronic Communication Services (ECS) and Remote Computing Services (RCS) providers from turning over those communications, but the motion was denied because Magistrate Judge John E. McDermott determined that Facebook, MySpace, and Media Temple did not qualify for protection from disclosure under the SCA.  Crispin moved for reconsideration with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

District Court Judge Margaret Morrow’s decision partially reversed and partially vacated Judge McDermott’s order, finding that the SCA’s protections (and associated discovery preclusions) include at least some of the content hosted on social networking sites, including the private messaging features of social networking sites protected as private email.  She also concluded that because Facebook, MySpace, and Media Temple all provide private messaging or email services as well as electronic storage, they all qualify as both ECS and RCS providers, with appropriate SCA protections.

However, regarding Facebook wall postings and MySpace comments, Judge Morrow determined that there was insufficient evidence to determine whether these wall postings and comments constitute private communications as the user’s privacy settings for them were less clear and ordered a new evidentiary hearing regarding the portions of the subpoenas that sought those communications.

This opinion sets a precedent that, in future cases, courts may allow protection to social networking and web hosting providers from discovery based on SCA protections as ECS and RCS providers and may consider social media ESI protected, based on the provider’s privacy controls and the individual user’s privacy settings.

So, what do you think?  Is this the most significant eDiscovery case of 2010?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Happy New Year from all of us at Trial Solutions and eDiscovery Daily!