An effective remedy for prolixity

I reported earlier today (Commercial Court judges set out their case management intentions) on the Commercial Court judges’ intention to limit the length of pleadings, witness statements etc as part of their firm commitment to cut the crap (they did not, I should add, put it like that, not in express terms anyway).

I owe to Mark Dingle at Simmons & Simmons a pointer to a case which is right on the point. It is not exactly current, dating as it does from 1595, and it involves a defendant called Weldon. It would not surprise anyone who practices in this area to find that Derby v Weldon had been running that long, but this case began even longer ago than that long-running saga, and the plaintiff was one Mylward. It may have been a different Weldon.

Commercial Court judges set out their case management intentions

A well-attended meeting of the Commercial Litigators’ Association on Monday was left in no doubt that the Commercial Court judges intend to follow closely the recommendations of the Commercial Court Long Trial Working Party

Allen & Overy were the hosts on 25 February when Mr Justice Richard Aikens, Mrs Justice Gloster and Mr Justice Andrew Smith led a panel session to talk about the practical effect of the Commercial Court Recommendations, which took effect on 1 February, and to invite questions and feedback on them.

Sir Richard Aikens was the chairman of the Working Party. Dame Elizabeth Gloster DBE was both a member of the Working Party and, it became clear, the prime author of the checklist which converts the Recommendations into a step-by-step guide. Sir Andrew Smith is the Judge in Charge of the Commercial Court. If we needed a sign that this is being taken seriously, the fielding of this team was it.

Networking thoughts after LegalTech

The LegalTech cud is still being chewed. The graph below show page views on this blog down to today, with an encouraging upward trend. The actual visits are not huge in absolute terms – 163 page views on one day last week is the record – but interest seems to be growing in what has been a minority activity in the UK.

That, incidentally, is the point of publishing the graph – we do not have many pointers as to how many people want to know about the subject. We know that many suppliers seem busy enough, but there is no composite figure for that. The readership of a single-issue web site gives us some feel for the level of interest.

The aim, of course, is to make this a mainstream activity for anyone who litigates here with any volume of electronic data, and the blog is only one of the initiatives which are in hand. There are a number of conferences planned in which I am involved in various capacities – as co-chair, facilitator, speaker or writer. There is bigger emphasis on the UK perspective in this year’s London-based international programmes, quite apart from those which focus exclusively on the CPR. I am happy to field any interest in these conferences and to point you in the right direction for whatever your interests are.

The Portability of H5’s Process

Contrary to my assumptions, H5’s very different approach to document review can be made available in the UK on data hosted here. Those with bigger cases should consider adding H5 to their list of possible solutions

I had breakfast with Michael Morneault and Terence Sweeney of H5 whilst I was in New York. The venue, Sarabeth’s Central Park South, which overlooks the bottom end of Central Park, would warrant a review of its own, but that is by the way.

I met Mike at LegalTech last year in a venue too dark to allow me to put a face to the name. I was intrigued by H5’s very different way of handling large amounts of electronic data and we kept in touch over the ensuing year.

Reduced to its simplest, H5 take over the whole process of extracting, refining and reviewing electronic sources of data, leaving the lawyers or corporate clients to focus on strategy, evaluation and assessment of risk or outcome. Put like that, it sounds as if the client is simply outsourcing the grunt work, but H5 are to conventional outsourcing what a Rolls Royce is to a donkey cart.

Access your data with eMAG

One of the many bonuses of going to LegalTech is the chance to talk to people whom one knows or knows of but never gets the chance to see – thus the apparently odd remark in my post Why no UK lawyers at LegalTech that I go there to see people from the UK. To see them here, one needs to make an appointment, catch a train and generally impose a degree of formality. At LegalTech you start chatting in the bar. Most of the conversation, even in the bar, is about the subject which brought us all to New York.

I was talking one evening to Ian Bartlett of eMAG Solutions about proportionate searches for documents – proportionality in e-Disclosure is my main focus, and extracting data from electronic media is eMAG’s business. Ian challenged my assertion that the recovery of data from tape was necessarily expensive.

EPIQ Systems and ECM join forces

A long working relationships between Epiq Systems and Effective Case Management (ECM) reached a natural culmination on 1 February when the two businesses were combined. Tony Ratcliffe, the founding owner of ECM becomes a member of Epiq’s London office team.

LDSI and LiveReview

I am not sure how I have worked in the litigation support industry for 15 years without meeting Noel Kilby, nor why it should, eventually, have been easier to do so in LDSI’s office in New York when we are both based in the UK.

That is how it turned out, however. I went, with Mark Dingle of Simmons & Simmons, to meet Noel, to see LDSI’s offices, and to have a look at their in-house document review application, called LiveReview.

Howrey sets up in India

Howrey, the US and global law firm known as much for its trial and litigation support services as for its legal practice, has opened an office in Pune, India, to handle its document management and similar functions. This, as the LAW.COM article about it suggests, combines the benefits of a well-educated but relatively low-paid work-force with the quality control which comes from running the show yourself.

Taking in such outsourced work has contributed much to India’s economy recently, and it is attractive in theory to consider delegating the labour-intensive work involved in litigation coding. Many US law firms are doing just that, but UK firms have been slower to go down this route. One reason is exactly the concerns over quality control which Howrey aims to beat with its own facility; another is the EU data protection and privacy rules. There is certainly some work going from the UK – and some predict an increase in the next year – but not as much as India would like.

Guidance on the Human Factor in eDiscovery

My first port of call in New York last week was Patrick Burke, Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software. I did a webinar with Patrick over Christmas (Americans don’t really do Christmas I discover – the last e-mail in on Christmas Eve came from Patrick, as did the first one of Boxing Day) and it was good to meet him at last after the hours of discussion we had about that.

I first came across Guidance Software at the IQPC conference in London last May, when Victor Limongelli (now CEO of the company) gave a talk which impressed because of his sure grasp of the UK court rules. Regular readers will know that I focus closely on the matching roles of rules and technology as weapons to keep the costs down, and it is rare to find any supplier, still less a US one, who articulates that viewpoint.

Basketball pointers for litigation management

eDiscovery Tools is an Australian company which makes software for processing e-mail and other electronic documents for litigation and similar purposes. Its main product is eDiscovery Processor, used by law firms, corporate clients, government departments and litigation support bureaux to extract and index full text and metadata from hundreds of file types and to export the results into a format ready for the majority of litigation support platforms, including FTI Ringtail, Concordance and CT Summation.

It caught my eye at LegalTech last year, and stuck in my mind partly for its obvious power, flexibility and user interface, but mainly because of the demonstrator’s reaction when I asked about an audit feature – an obscure point to do with removed attachments. The chap stared into the distance for a moment and said no, that was not covered – but if I were to ask the same question in a month’s time, I would find that it was.

Trilantic sessions round off LegalTech

As in previous years, Trilantic organised three sessions for the last day of LegalTech. They are generally less formal than the other sessions and, as I have said elsewhere, take important subjects with a light tone.

I thought I would summarise what was said, but cannot in fact do so because I got an e-mail a few minutes into the first one, offering an opportunity to see someone whom I very much wanted to meet. My account of the sessions will necessarily be light on content.

The first one was called International eDiscovery Rules, Standards and Challenges. The Moderator was George Socha and the panelists were Browning Marean of DLA Piper, Laura Kibbe of Pfizer, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy and Michelle Mahoney of Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

Trilantic delivers Translation Services

Trilantic has launched Trilantic Translation Services (TTS) which, they say, is the first translation service which uses the accuracy of human translation with the power of technology.

TTS is described as a robust, highly effective, fast translation service [which] is considerably more accurate than any of the automated and Web based tools currently available. The key ingredient is a case-specific translation dictionary which is built up when the foreign-language documents are loaded into the system.

Trilantic say that the average human translator can handle about 2,500 words per day, making this stage a time-consuming and expensive one – especially as it is done across the whole document population, before culling has removed those which are irrelevant. TTS can translate at the rate of 6,000 pages per hour, which means that the inclusion of a high proportion of foreign-language documents need not delay the lawyer review.

Key documents can be manually translated later if that is required for admissibility.

For more information, contact Nigel Murray nigel.murray@trilantic.co.uk at Trilantic on +44 20 7042 1000

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Trilantic sets out EU Data Protection Rules

The EU Data Protection Rules – Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council – On the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data to give its snappy full name – are the usual bureaucrats’ quagmire, giving the impression that their primary purpose is to provide job opportunities for Belgian civil servants.

Whatever we may think of them, we cannot avoid them, and those who work in this area must tread carefully. A thank-you, therefore, to Trilantic, who have summarised them all, with links to each country from a clickable map, and to the text of the relevant Articles. They prudently accompany it with a Disclaimer.

The guide can be found here.

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Anacomp and IPRO announce strategic alliance

Anacomp has announced an alliance with IPRO which will integrate IPRO’s eCapture software application into CaseLogistix.

Anacomp does rather good press releases this days and I cannot better their own description

The integration between IPRO eCapture and CaseLogistix eliminates batch transfers between the applications and the associated human and system overhead. Users will be able to load large sets of unknown documents, files, and materials more rapidly and in a completely native workflow, eliminating the costly and time-consuming process of converting native files to TIFF images and extracting the text files.

Anacomp introduces hosted CaseLogistix

Anacomp, the business process solutions company which acquired CaseLogistix last year, has announced that it is now making CaseLogistix available on-demand via its hosted docHarbor information platform.

CaseLogistix was anyway one of the most interesting litigation support review applications on the market and was a natural choice when Anacomp went looking for a litigation front-end for its vast hosting facilities. It is hard to argue with Anacomp’s own description of CaseLogistix as a powerful and versatile litigation review and integration solution available today, providing a complete system for streamlined electronic document organization, annotation, discovery management and production.

Why no UK lawyers at LegalTech?

“When does the full LegalTech blog get released” asks a reader, obviously impatient with my chatty discursive wanderings around the subject. I assume he expects a full narrative, starting at Session 1 on Day 1 and ending with an extended analysis of the wider implications for the industry of everything announced, propounded or concluded during the three days, with particular reference to their implications for the UK litigation support industry.

Well, I am sorry to disappoint, but that is not what I go to LegalTech for. You can read all about those things elsewhere, as indeed can I. What you can’t do elsewhere is have all the meetings and the conversations, catch up with the gossip from the UK, the US and Australia, and sniff the breeze. I had four fixed meetings in one morning, but mostly I bumped into people in bars or corridors, hailed or was hailed by people I knew – and, in some cases, by people I did not know who read this blog.

Service with a snarl undoes technology miracles

Good technology must be matched by good people, and it is often the people who let it down. Any technology budget must include a large element for support and training. It is not just the salesmen who need a good client manner.

I was talking at LegalTech to John Turner, Chief Technology Officer at Anacomp who produce and host the on-line review application CaseLogistix. The conversation turned to the cost of delivering e-disclosure solutions. It is not in fact my view that the technology is too expensive – some is over-priced, but the problem it tackles is immense, some of it is near-miraculous in its power, and the alternative – in lawyer hours or abandoned litigation – is hardly cheap.

The main expense, John Turner said, was not the software but the support, adding (with some justification) that CaseLogistix was more user-friendly than most. The support is critical to a successful roll-out and, assuming that the purchase was properly specified in the first place, it is the support which makes for success or failure. It it not just an add-on, but a critical component, without which the technology investment is wasted.

Pocketing the key technology at LegalTech

My new Blackberry helps me organise what is important. It does not decide what is important. The same should be true of e-disclosure applications. Both are an aid to efficient processes, not a substitute for them.

My heading may have brought you here under false pretences. This is not, as you may have hoped, my assessment of the new developments being announced in the speeches or on display at the booths. The key technology so far as I am concerned is in my pocket and on my lap-top.

Feeling at home back at LegalTech in New York

You come to this site, I know, for sharp, incisive, witty stuff about the e-disclosure world, the court rules, the case law, the new developments. There is plenty of that at LegalTech here in New York, but those who do not come here may like a feel for the event, the place and the context.

Legal Technology Awards 2008

The Legal Technology Awards 2008 happened five days and an ocean away – two oceans, in fact, one called the Atlantic and one poured from various bottles on both sides of the Atlantic. Both time and tide mean that my recollections are necessarily hazy, so if you want an authoritative account of who won what, I suggest you go to the LTA’s own site.

Waiting for the Oxford bus at the top of Park Lane at 2:00am on the first morning of February is a sobering experience. Just as well really. Nigel Murray of Trilantic, whose guest I was, had pressed the first glass of champagne into my hand at 6:15 the previous evening. I drained the last at 01:30. In between came dinner (rather better than one expects on these occasions), the awards themselves, and several hours of shouted conversation in a crowded bar.