CY4OR signs partnership agreement with Guidance Software for EnCase Enterprise

UK-based forensics company CY4OR has reached an agreement with Guidance Software under which CY4OR will offer and support Guidance Software’s EnCase Enterprise Platform. This is a logical development for CY4OR, building on their nine-year history of forensic investigations and collections work which has already brought them into corporate electronic disclosure with a website dedicated to that part of their work.

A glance at the information page for EnCase Enterprise will quickly show why CY4OR has gone down this route. The passage about ….

a proven, cost effective method to investigate HR related matters (such as corporate policy violations, harassment complaints or computer misuse allegations), IP theft, fraud, computer security incidents and more

… ties in with and extends CY4OR’s established skills in this area of forensic investigation. The ability to collect data from servers and workstations on the corporate network without disruption to the business is important for both cost and time reasons – investigations of this kind almost invariably require urgent, if not instant, attention, but business must go on whilst it is happening.

Related as I am to both companies through their respective sponsorships of the eDisclosure Information Project, I look forward to hearing how the partnership goes and will report back when it has had a chance to bed down.

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2012 eDisclosure and eDiscovery Predictions

SCL, the website of the Society for Computers & Law, has kindly published my predictions for eDisclosure / eDiscovery for 2012. Every year, Editor Laurence Eastham collects predictions across a wide range of the subjects where technology meets the law, providing one of the few occasions where I am happy for an original article of mine to be first published somewhere other than on my own blog.

One year I will manage to provide them early enough for Laurence to include them in the print version of the SCL Magazine. That has been a consistent source of high-quality articles for many years, and I strongly recommend an SCL subscription to anyone with a professional interest in any aspect of legal IT – subscription information is on the SCL web site.

The current predictions are grouped together. Two of them, Discovery Divinations and Much More and Disputes and Developments, have a direct bearing on eDisclosure. The rest, between them, cover a wide range of subjects.

The same page gives links to the last two years’ predictions. It would be interesting to review them and see how accurate or otherwise we all were.

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Shortened version of Epiq white paper published by New Law Journal

A recent post of mine, called Epiq Systems White Paper: from start to finish – what actually happens to my clients data? referred to a white paper which I wrote with Deborah Blaxell of Epiq. The paper has now been published in a shortened form by the New Law Journal with the title Information Highway.

Its theme is one I have been promoting this year and will continue to promote next year – that the lawyers, whether in-house or external, who want or need to commission the services of a services provider, can have little understanding by default of what stages and processes, both human and technical, take place once instructions have been given. We need to make sure that we fill this gap if people are to be encouraged to take that first step.

The article was first published in the New Law Journal “Information Highway”, NLJ 9 December 2011, p 1703.

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Big 4 a reason – a GC’s Eye View of professional service client relationships

Tom Kilroy is General Counsel at a publicly quoted company, leading a team of around 35 people. His blog, GC’s Eye View, is sub-titled Thoughts on law and business from a General Counsel at a publicly traded company. Those who offer professional services to such companies, and who want to know what they look like from the other side of the desk, would find it illuminating to read Tom’s occasional thoughts on his blog and to follow him on Twitter.

The title of his latest post is Big 4 a reason, and you do not need great powers of deduction to guess from this that the article has positive things to say about PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG. It is not that Tom is particularly critical of law firms, but they suffer by the comparison with the Big 4 in the way that they relate to their clients.

The Big 4, Tom says, are “thoughtful about what is really important to their clients” and “think very carefully about how to engage with and develop their current and future clients.” The overall impression, it seems, is of a common interest in client and professional adviser working together which (one deduces) is not evident in dealings with law firms as a class.

One sentence in particular caught my eye in relation to my own area of interest. Tom Kilroy says “I saw a Big 4 pitch which laid out what the firm could do for us, but only on the condition that we achieved certain things for ourselves”. There is no real argument in the eDiscovery / eDisclosure world that the solution to the pain, cost and disruption of eDiscovery demands is information governance and, in particular, the development of policies and processes which ensure that a company keeps (and can find) the documents which it ought to keep and disposes of those which it does not need.