Interview with James Moeskops of Millnet on Predictive Coding

In the light of Judge Peck’s Da Silva Moore Opinion approving the use of predictive coding in US Federal civil proceedings, I recently interviewed James Moeskops of Millnet about the use of this technology in English courts. The result is a podcast which you can find here.

Anecdotally, the use of such software is increasing in the UK – I say “anecdotally” because such things rarely become the subject of published judgments in the UK, and my information is the aggregate of feedback from providers who, like Millnet, have the software and the skill to provide it.

One of the two cases covered in my article Two predictive coding case studies emphasise time and cost savings involved a UK matter in which Millnet and Eversheds used Equivio’s Relevance product, and I thought it worth following this up now that we have a US opinion on the subject.

The brief recording begins with a short introduction from me describing in simple terms what predictive coding is. I then ask James Moeskops the sort of questions which might be asked by a would-be user – when would Millnet suggest the use of predictive coding, and what questions would James ask to get a feel for the case?  I also ask James to describe the process which Millnet would go through, in conjunction with the lawyers, to apply predictive coding technology to the data.

I conclude by asking James where he sees predictive coding going over the next 12 months, specifically in the UK.

Speaking and learning at iCONECT’s Global Summit on Litigation Technology

I had the pleasure and privilege of giving the opening day’s keynote speech at iCONECT’s Global Summit on Litigation Technology in Florida last week. I brought back at least as much as I delivered in terms of the understanding of eDiscovery which the event was designed to foster. I also enjoyed myself immensely.

The venue was the Hilton at Fort Lauderdale which, for the geographically challenged, lies north up the coast from Miami. There is a set of photographs here. The sea winds in everywhere here, with expensive-looking leisure vessels (“boats” rather understates it) moored alongside the hotel and strong breezes bringing squalls of rain out of a clear sky. I arrived on Saturday evening, finding Nigel Murray of Huron Legal already there, as I usually do on these occasions, almost anywhere in the world.

iCONECT’s Chief Operating Officer, Ian Campbell, opened the show with a quick survey of the new Xera which was launched at LegalTech. I wrote approvingly of its appearance,  saying of it:

“An interface designed for the Facebook and LinkedIn generation but which nevertheless conveys businesslike efficiency is just what we need. Xera has all that and more. The expression “to raise the bar” is much overused, and probably belongs with “unique” and “revolutionary” in the marketeer’s verbal dustbin, but I’m willing to use it this once – Xera will raise the bar for user-friendly application interfaces in eDiscovery”

Ian Campbell’s talk took us behind the interface, talking of billion item projects, freedom from Active-X, data migration into and out of Xera,  advanced analytics and domain searches; we heard about the ability to develop your own “tiles” to personalise the interface and the workflows, and about relationships with, for example, Wave, Kazeon, Nuix and Opus 2′s Magnum.

Then it was my turn. I rarely do speeches, preferring to moderate or take part in panels, but the opportunity to devote an hour to a subject of my choice, and in such company, was not to be ignored. I chose as my title Innovation and Informed Risk-Taking are an eDiscovery Duty which was, and not by coincidence, the title of an article I wrote after LegalTech. The broad themes were to do with the responsibility, shared by all the players – judges, lawyers, in-house legal, IT and information professionals, suppliers and law schools – to lift our collective heads from the craven fear of sanctions and the illusory search for a perfection which the rules do not require anyway.

Peck predictive coding Opinion upheld: does anyone remember what this case is actually about?

It is fascinating to watch a story break on Twitter. The news that District Judge Carter had upheld US Magistrate Judge Peck’s opinion in Da Silva Moore appeared first as a rumour, probably within a few minutes of the promulgation of Judge Carter’s opinion. Within a short time, rumour was supported by links to the opinion itself, and not long after that the first commentary appeared.

Like Judge Carter, I am going to assume your “familiarity with the facts and the predictive coding method”. As in most jurisdictions, an order will only be overturned if it was “clearly erroneous or…contrary to law” and Judge Carter found no such grounds.

Key quotations will be recycled for months to come, Including these:

“The court adopts Judge Peck’s rulings because they are well reasoned and they consider the potential advantages and pitfalls of the predictive coding software”

“The ESI protocol contains standards for measuring the reliability of the process and the protocol builds in levels of participation by plaintiffs”

“If plaintiffs determine that they are missing relevant documents, they may revisit the issue of whether the software is the best method”

“There is simply no review tool that guarantees perfection….. Manual review with keyword searches is costly….[and] is prone to human error and marred with inconsistencies from the various attorneys’ determinations of whether a document is responsive”.

“Judge Peck concluded that under the circumstances of this particular case, the use of the predictive coding software as specified in the ESI protocol is more appropriate than keyword searching. The court does not find a basis to hold that his conclusion is clearly erroneous or contrary to law”.

The opinion ends with this:

“The court reminds the parties that it affords Judge Peck’s non-dispositive rulings great deference and Magistrate Judges generally have broad latitude with respect to discovery issues”

It is worth emphasising this latter point (that is, the fact that Judge Carter added this “reminder” on to his Opinion) because the plaintiffs motion for recusal (that is, the removal of Judge Peck from hearing these issues) is still extant.  I am spared having to say too much about the plaintiffs’ lawyers by my self-imposed rule which bars overt criticism of identifiable individuals in eDiscovery – I am happy to damn with faint praise (if you are unfamiliar with that expression see the penultimate sentence of this article), to attack whole classes, or to balance negative comments with something more positive, but there are no half-measures or mitigating factors here, so it is best to keep my mouth shut – well, not my mouth, perhaps, but at least to be restrained in what I write.

The Dominic Regan podcast for IQPC’s London Summit

I wrote recently about the podcasts which IQPC have put on their website as tasters for their Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit which takes place in London between 14 and 16 May.

You may be interested in another one which is available from here without having to complete the registration form.

It is one which I recorded with Professor Dominic Regan with the title Why the Jackson Reforms mean the biggest ever upheaval for litigation. I have already published a transcript of this interview but those who prefer to listen rather than read can now hear this short recording.

This is complemented by an article written by Dominic Regan called Lord Justice Jackson has no regrets over his proposal on civil litigation costs, which he wants to see implemented next April “in their entirety”.

Dominic Regan is one of the many well-known speakers at the Summit and his talk is likely to be a major attraction for those who want to know how the practice and procedure of litigation is likely to develop.

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A reminder of Nigel Murray’s bike ride for Help for Heroes

I saw on the news last night the funeral of yet another British soldier killed in Afghanistan. He was married to a local girl and had three boys. He was 25.

It reminded me about this year’s Big Battlefield Bike Ride in aid of Help for Heroes which Nigel Murray and others from Huron Legal’s London office are bravely undertaking. The “heroes” referred to are the many who do not die but who are brought back home badly injured.

I wrote about Nigel’s 2012 involvement in my article Nigel goes over the top on his bottom for Help for Heroes. I am given to understand that he is in training, recently in Dubai, whence he reported as follows:

With only 6 weeks to go until the off (20th May) my training needs to step up a bit!  I was fortunate to be in Dubai for a week before Easter and managed to take a couple of days off.  So, hired a bike from a local shop and on the first morning headed into the desert, mostly on roads, however now and again these ran out, so had to walk to the next bit of road!.  Well, the climate in Dubai, like in other parts of the world, is getting pretty unpredictable and erratic.  On the day I landed it was in the late 20’s (early 80’s) however on the day I headed into the desert (leaving the bike shop at 1130am)  it rose to 42 degrees (107).  And with a decent wind blowing up the sand it was an interesting experience – and one that I am unlikely to face in Northern France.  At one stage I took to sitting on a box in the underground car park of a horse race track, drinking my bottle of (very warm) water trying to cool down!  Good for fitness though – and I survived.  All in all, I probably managed about 90 miles in Dubai over 3 rides – I say probably because I had no speedo so distances were a guess based on an assumption of an average speed of 15 mph and the time actually riding

As happens every year, I will be abroad, this time in Las Vegas for CEIC. One year I will actually fulfill my ambition of a giving Nigel a wave as he pedals past.

It is good to see so many names from the eDiscovery/eDisclosure industry supporting Nigel. If you would like to join them, the donations page is here.

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Reed Smith chooses Equivio Zoom for Predictive Coding and Analytics and Relativity for Review

Since both Equivio and Relativity sponsor the work of the eDisclosure Information Project, I am necessarily interested in reports of their big sales. I do not, however, write about every success on the part of those who fund what I do because they, as well as I, value my readership and know that we would soon drive it away if all that you found here was lists of buyers. That function is ably served by others, and I am spared having to decide, for example, whether this sale is worth reporting where that one was not, quite apart from considerations like having only a finite number of hours in a week.

Every so often, however, a law firm or other user makes a strategic purchase which serves in some way as a model which others ought to follow – not necessarily with the same suppliers, but as the product of a coherent plan to offer an integrated set of services to clients which reconciles quality with cost.  There is a fiercely competitive market out there of software suppliers, providers of managed review, and consultants offering project management and other skills, and a decision to bring all that in house is not lightly made.

Bye Bye Google Plus – for now at least

In case you are wondering at the number of short posts which I have put here this morning, I began the day intending to capture short notes on my Google Plus page.  I have invested a fair amount of time in Google Plus since its business pages were launched, and found it a convenient way to capture more of the ever-growing volume of interesting eDiscovery / eDisclosure material which accumulates in any week.

Having dictated a few today, I went off to add them to Google Plus. Google has recently given Google Plus what its probably calls “exciting enhancements to the user experience” or some such drivel. I call it “frigging around with the user interface”.  So far as the reader is concerned, the new layout truncates my business name, making it the “eDisclosure Information Projec” or ”eDisclosure Information Pro” and perhaps other variants depending on your screen resolution. More significantly, from my point of view, you can no longer edit the link made via by the paperclip – you only get one shot at it – nor do you have the option to remove any text from the linked file which is carried over by making the link – this used to be a single-click action.

If there are in fact workarounds for these things, I can’t be bothered to look for them. I want a quick publishing tool, not a new hobby.

I may come back to it, but for now I will leave Google Plus to play with itself. The result will be an increased number of short posts on this blog where I would rather have kept it for the longer and more thoughtful posts. Another drawback is that those who have signed up for blog e-mail notifications will receive rather more of them, something I had hoped to avoid by the use of Google Plus.

I will continue to put links from Google Plus into this blog for SEO purposes and, perhaps, do the occasional very short entry there, if only to keep in touch with developments while Google plays catch-up with others. I may well look at some of those others – Pinterest for example – in the meantime, in part to find the best way to display photographs. Google Plus does this very well; Pinterest may do it better.

There is a moral here somewhere for those who think that change with enhancement are synonyms.

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The Orange Rag on consolidation in the eDiscovery market

Charles Christian’s Orange Rag brings us a helpful summary of the recent round of acquisitions in the eDiscovery sector with the heading The Great eDiscovery Shakeup – or is that Shakeout? and predicts that 2012 will see yet more of them.

Charles describes Google as the elephant in this particular room (in the proper sense of the very big thing that no-one mentions), drawing the conclusion that Google’s appointment last summer of Autonomy’s Jack Halprin is a sign that Google wants a slice of the eDiscovery market.

I raised much the same point last summer when Halprin was appointed asking “why, exactly, does Google want a senior client-facing executive with the word ‘Enterprise’ in his job title?” on the eDiscovery side.

Charles Christian sees this potential development as an encouragement to smaller  eDiscovery players to “look for an exit”, that is, to get themselves acquired as soon as possible. There are many other reasons why they might want to do this, of course.

The Orange Rag article to which I have linked is part of the latest issue of the American Legal Technology Insider, a copy of which can be obtained here.

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Lord Justice Jackson to undergo cancer operation

A brief note on the judiciary website reports that Lord Justice Jackson will shortly be undergoing an operation for cancer. His absence is not expected to impede the work of the implementation of the Costs Review Final Report which will be conducted by the Judicial Steering Group in his absence.

I wish him a successful operation and a speedy recovery, first and most obviously for his sake, but also for the sake of the reforms which he has been driving through, fighting indifference and apathy as well as positive opposition.

Supporters outnumber opponents, however vociferous some of the latter may be, and Lord Justice Jackson has won the respect of many of those who oppose some of his aims. It is hoped that he will be back by October.

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Greg Wildisen of Epiq Systems on Predictive Coding in UK eDisclosure

The Society for Computers and Law has published on its website an article by Greg Wildisen, International Managing Director at Epiq Systems with the title E-disclosure: Training Technology.

Epiq offers predictive coding through the integration of Equivio’s Relevance product into Epiq’s IQ Review, a mixture of technology and consultancy services. Greg Wildisen summarises briefly the story behind Judge Peck’s Opinion in Da Silva Moore v Publicis Groupe which approved the use of predictive coding technology in a case in which parties had agreed to use the technology, and considers the likely reaction when this type of technology is used in UK proceedings.

He focuses on the significance of analysing non-relevant as well as relevant documents and, potentially, of doing so cooperatively with opponents in order to win agreement about the validity of the process. He thinks it possible that lawyers may object to the disclosure (in the broadest sense of that term) of documents which are not strictly required in the present litigation, not least because of implications for future cases.

I am reasonably optimistic about this, partly because (as Greg Wildisen makes clear) judges have discretion to make whatever orders they think appropriate for the better conduct of the case before them, and partly because clients’ objections are likely to whither in the face of the enormous potential for cost savings – they will be willing to give a little to gain a lot or, at least, to make a proper assessment of the risks against the advantages

We shall see. Meanwhile, Greg Wildisen’s article is a good short summary of implications which UK lawyers and their clients should be thinking about.

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Mary Mack of ZyLAB: eDiscovery – A Focus on Cost Saving and Winning

Metropolitan Corporate Counsel recently interviewed Mary Mack, Enterprise Technology Counsel for ZyLAB. The result is published as eDiscovery – a Focus on Cost Saving and Winning.

Subjects include moves by corporate counsel to take more control of eDiscovery, the ongoing discussions about potential changes to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and developments in Technology-Assisted Review following Judge Peck’s Opinion in Da Silva Moore.

Mary Mack also talks about the difference between qualitative and quantitative early case assessment, the processing of non-standard items, and redaction.

The main message is that tools exist to take control of ESI and to reduce the time and cost of the components of the eDiscovery exercise, freeing lawyers to spend time on the issues and on strategic legal advice.

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New Zealand’s new Discovery Rules and Electronic Discovery

New Zealand introduced new discovery rules in February 2012, making it the most recent common law jurisdiction to exercise closer control over how the lawyers and courts conduct the management of discovery – which inevitably means largely electronic discovery.

His Honour Judge David Harvey is a New Zealand District Court judge. I met him at the excellent Singapore conference on Electronic Litigation last year and we have kept in touch. He has written an article jointly with Daniel Garrie of Law and Forensics LLC and called New Zealand’s New Discovery Rules and Electronic Discovery which summarises the new rules and which has been published this week by the UK Society for Computers and Law.

I hope to come back to this subject, but meanwhile point you to this interesting description of developments in a jurisdiction which, by standing back for a while, had the opportunity to observe what the rest of us were doing before introducing its new discovery rules.

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Interesting times in eDiscovery and outside it

I find that I field complaints if I fall silent for a few days. It is, of course, gratifying that anyone should notice, and a word or two of explanation might pre-empt the assumption that I have packed up and gone home – or, rather, left home, since home is where I work.

The weeks leading up to Easter were pretty busy, not because of any great commitments of mine, but because of the buzz in the eDiscovery world about Judge Peck’s opinion in Da Silva Moore and the ensuing – and disgraceful – ad hominem attacks on one of the few judges who understands about the application of technology to the just, speedy and inexpensive obligation in Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Ciivl Procedure. The UK had its own share of activity, with a run of eDisclosure-related judgments after a long period without any.

Although I have not needed my passport since LegalTech, there was a long period in which there was always another video or webinar looming. They are fun to do, and a good way of getting messages to wider audiences, but they each have a back-story of conference calls and slide preparation whose drawback is not the aggregated time spent on them but the deadlines and the carving up of the days which they involve. In addition, there are conferences coming up between the end of April and mid-November which, to varying degrees, require planning calls and drafts now.

None of this usually interferes with the ordinary run of producing articles, which I am happy to do one sentence at a time if necessary in between other things. White papers are a different matter, requiring proper research, the assembly of sources, a structure, and time to stare at the screen whilst the ideas form. There were a clutch of those to do, and that requires switching off Twitter and email and ignoring everything else but the task in hand. I had long ear-marked the week after Easter as a good time to cut myself out of the information stream.

Articles on eDisclosure, eDiscovery, Cooperation and Privacy by UK and US Judges

For reasons which I may explain separately, I had banked on the Easter period being quiet on the eDiscovery front. On the whole, that hope was justified, with Twitter relatively quiet, few interesting things to pass on, e-mail volumes down, and almost no phone calls.

What did appear just before the break, however, were no fewer than four important and interesting articles by judges, two from England and Wales and two from the US. I group them together here with the briefest of introductions – none of these people need much help from me to get their messages across.

The UK articles are written by HHJ Simon Brown QC and Senior Master Whitaker who, apart from Lord Justice Jackson, are the two judges best able to cover this ground (that is not saying that they are the only ones who are competent to adjudicate on eDisclosure and case management issues, but only they articulate views for the guidance of court users).

Both these articles appear on the New Law Journal site which is increasingly the source of choice for those who seek thoughtful commentary on litigation matters (and on other practice areas, no doubt). The NLJ has recognised the importance of these two articles by making them free to view.

Using a neutral third party to resolve or prevent disclosure disputes

One of the most useful UK resources about electronic disclosure is Clive Freedman’s electronic disclosure wiki at www.eDisclosure.uk.com.

Clive Freedman is a barrister at 3 Verulam Buildings and is (as I am) a member of Senior Master Whitaker’s working party which produced the eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B and the Electronic Documents Questionnaire. It is he who shouldered the burden of translating our deliberations into drafts and who, with Master Whitaker himself, set out to ensure that the practical and technical inputs were made to fit within the formal and procedural requirements imposed by the conventional structure of the Rules.

Clive’s website provides links to the relevant rules and practice directions and other sources of relevant materials, and adds references to cases in the courts which deal with eDisclosure. If it is my role to provide the narrative, Clive provides the nuts and bolts.

Clive has recently added a new section to his website with the heading “Using a neutral third party to resolve or prevent disclosure disputes” in which he discusses how a neutral may be able to assist the parties, with a view to minimising the delay and expense which may arise where parties are unable to reach agreement.  It is relevant in this context to know that he is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and an experienced mediator of IT disputes.

His new section sets out the passage from Lord Justice Jackson’s Preliminary Report about the possibility of using what were referred to as ”disclosure assessors”. Such a person could, Lord Justice Jackson said, ”immerse himself/herself in the issues and the primary documents and identify which categories of documents on both sides truly merit disclosure” as well as dealing with other disputes relating to disclosure.

As Lord Justice Jackson’s Final Report says, this suggestion aroused strong views on both sides. I personally support the idea, partly as a remedy for the lack of specialist skills amongst case managing judiciary, and partly because of the US experience of Special Masters who perform an analogous function.

For the moment, anyway, there is no provision in the Rules for the role of disclosure assessor. Like so much else, however, there is no reason why parties should not appoint such a person by private agreement in an appropriate case, ”appropriate” generally implying that time and costs are to be saved by the joint instruction of a neutral person to stand between the parties, with an understanding of the Rules, the parties’ objectives and the techniques (a wider concept than mere technology) which might be used to cut down the disclosure burden.

It takes a particular type of skill to fulfil this role, and it is not one I seek for myself. Clive, however, does have the necessary experience, and is ready to use it to assist parties in minimising delay and expense.

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First Advantage to host cross-border regulatory conference in Brussels

Updated on 19 April to include a link to the press release about this event including the timetable.

I wrote recently about the acquisition of DLR Legal by First Advantage Litigation Consulting, which brings together FADV’s technology and consulting skills and DLR Legal’s multilingual review expertise.

I have also written and spoken a lot recently about litigation and regulatory investigations which raise legal, practical, technical and language issues, often simultaneously and often at very short notice. Regulatory investigation raise implications, and have timescales, which are particularly challenging.

The first fruits of FADV’s acquisition comes on 24 April when they host a conference on The Hidden Risks of Cross-Border Regulatory Investigations at the Cercle de Lorraine, Brussels. The event is introduced by DLR Legal’s co-founder Mathieu van Ravenstein.

The legal context is provided by Andrew Hockley, a partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP, whose subject is Cartels and Leniency. Drew Macaulay of First Advantage is speaking on Challenges in gathering and reviewing evidence in regulatory investigations. Michele Tagliaferri, an Associate at Sidley Austin LLP brings together the legal and practical implications with a talk called Data collection, review and transfer issues.

All this is conveniently gathered together in an event which starts at 11:30am  CET and finishes in time for lunch at 13.15pm. For further information about the event, or to register, send an e-mail to virginie.dierckx@fadv.com.

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My Google Plus eDiscovery and eDisclosure posts to 6 April

A two-day absence in a place where cellular data has yet to penetrate put me behind in the routine task of picking up useful articles and putting links to them on my Google Plus page.

Google’s enthusiasm for rolling out new features seems to have outstripped both its ability to handle the basics and its provision of any form of usable support. I am unable to edit posts at the moment – any attempt to save changes gives the message There was a problem saving your page. Please try again. Trying again yields no better answer.

The sunny uplands of Google’s formal help sections do not appear to admit of the possibility of problems. The alternative is a messy forum in which every user dumps questions and issues. An ordinary Google search may turn up the words you are looking for, but then just puts you at the top of an unsorted, unfiltered list of hundreds of questions, none of which ever seems to be answered. The only way to correct the error is to copy the contents to a new post, correct the error (in my case just a missing apostrophe), save the new one and delete the original.

The more positive side, justifying even this tiresomeness, is that the links from here index well in Google. This week’s G+ posts, excluding those which link back to my own Blog, are:

Joanna Goodman on the Commercial Litigation Association (CLAN) conference in London

FCPA expert Michael Volkov move to “entrepreneurial” LeClairRyan

Ten years of eDiscovery mergers, acquisitions and investments

Are you a Data Controller or a Data Processor? It might be helpful to know

Judge Waxse sets an evidential hearing on hearing of obviously inadequate search

A window into eDiscovery disputes – Day 2 of the Kleen Products case

CY4OR seeks Champions for Sales and Marketing Roles in the North-West

ASIC signs Three-Year Contract with Nuix for Electronic Investigation Software

Predictive Coding – its Providers and its Synonyms from Rob Robinson

Guidance Software launches EnCase Forensic 7.03 for Faster, More Efficient Investigations

Google Apps Vault Brings Information Governance to Google Apps

Law Firms take note: Nikon takes Symantec’s Clearwell eDiscovery Platform in house

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Relativity – channelling the enthusiasm at kCura

kCura’s growth prompts thoughts about how companies and industries (and empires and whole civilisations come to that) start and grow, and how they must keep moving forward to stay at the top.

The accepted wisdom, promoted by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant for E-Discovery Software of May 2011, is that there will be no new entrants into the eDiscovery / eDisclosure software market. A number of factors appear to support this idea: the cost of entry is too high; corporate counsel and law firms are, in general, looking to reduce the number of providers with whom they work; whilst the technology improves every year, the improvements are refinements of a by now fairly standard set of core technologies, with attention focused on wringing more speed, more accuracy, and greater usability out of them; the trend is towards consolidation, as players merge or acquire each other, and any new players will come in by buying an existing one;  there are not enough skilled people to float a new eDiscovery player; the emphasis is on better ways of meeting clients’ objectives, of becoming more consultative and of improving both the user experience and support rather than on inventing new technology.

It would be foolish, of course, to look too far ahead in this as in any technology-driven industry. I live by a canal, for example, which, when it was completed in 1790, was the last word in transport infrastructure, the latest venture in a short and intensive spate of development which had underpinned fast industrial and sociological change, making it possible for the first time to bring food, fuel and raw materials into the cities which grew as a result, and to carry the products of the factories out to new markets. On the other side of my house is the railway, which reached Oxford 50 years later and  made the canal more or less redundant overnight. Over the next 120 years, railway technology barely changed – engines became faster and more reliable, and infrastructure and safety were improved, but the pioneers would have recognised the railways which they invented right down to the point when they were wiped out in their turn by cars, trucks and buses. Other industries show similar patterns.

Much the same happens with companies. New players appear, work hard at developing new ideas and grow, becoming, perhaps, the industrial giants of their time, before either falling apart under their own, by then ponderous, weight, or being overtaken by more agile rivals. The history of the British Empire followed the same pattern, and it seems likely that the supremacy of the whole Western world is going the same way. Furthermore, the wheels are turning faster, and one can go from nothing to domination and back again in a very short space. Longevity lies in constant reinvention and in retaining the ability to keep the freshness of youthful success whilst expanding and prospering.

I have not looked back at my archive, but I suspect that I have written in these terms before about kCura, the makers of the Relativity eDiscovery software for analysis, review and production.  The earliest reference I made to Relativity was in July 2008, when I first met its founder and CEO, Andrew Sieja.  He came to see me in Oxford, and we walked up the canal and by the railway which gave me the parallels which appear above. If I had had any spare money, I think I would have invested in kCura on the strength of his ambition to make it succeed. It was not the technology which would have parted me from my money –  Andrew may have known where that was going, but I certainly did not – but the ambitious yet wholly credible roadmap.  This is what I said at the time:

Equivio spells out predictive coding basics on ESIBytes podcast

Yet again, I find myself pointing to one of Karl Schieneman’s ESIBytes podcasts as a source of timely and coherent explanations of topical eDiscovery issues.

Predictive coding inevitably dominates at the moment, thanks to the coincidence of the Da Silva Moore and Kleen Products litigation. In both cases, although in very different ways, the defensibility of predictive coding / technology assisted review / computer assisted review / call it what you will / is at issue.  Most of us who are interested in encouraging the use of predictive coding would have preferred a less confused battleground than is offered by either of these cases, and value any explanations which stick to basic propositions uncluttered by the wider agendas coming out of the cases.

Anyone who speaks from first-hand experience, whether as a provider or a user, will have a preferred product; what matters are the core concepts, and it would be odd if speakers did not use their own or their preferred products to illustrate these concepts. Here, as in his other podcasts, Karl taps the special knowledge of his speakers to draw out broader understanding.

Warwick Sharp of Equivio is a particularly lucid advocate, both of the specific components and workflows in Equivio’s Relevance product and of the wider principles – it is from him that I got the idea that the true test of a technical explanation is whether your mother, having heard it, can explain it back to you. He is one of the speakers on Karl Schieneman’s Predictive Coding and Review Roundtable recorded on 26 March; the others are Jim Wagner co-founder and CEO of DiscoverReady, and Tom Gricks, head of E-Discovery at the law firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis, both of whom were early converts to, and are convinced users of, predictive coding where that use is appropriate to save their clients’ money without diminishing their arguments, their strategy or their proper conduct of cases.

Machine learning to anticipate eDiscovery not just to manage it

Jim Shook of EMC takes us back to the stage before discovery. The advanced technology used for dealing reactively with discovery requests has its place at a much earlier stage in the process.

Judge Peck’s opinion in Da silva Moore passes into a kind of limbo pending its review by Federal Judge Carter.  The analysis of the present position has been exhaustive and, to some extent, repetitive, and those of us who comment on these things have little more to say until Judge Carter does his stuff. We are waiting, too, for the next step in the Kleen Products case before Judge Nolan. It is a bit like one of those uneasy patches on the French battlefields of the Great War as everyone waited for the whistle signalling the next big push.

It is a good opportunity, perhaps, to look in a more rounded way at the broad class of technology which, whether you call it predictive coding, technology-assisted review, machine learning, or whatever, connotes generally the idea that computers learn from a mixture of rules and previous inputs  in order to “predict” what should be done with documents, classes of documents or, perhaps, whole servers full of documents.  The technology being developed for this, and for similar functions which have nothing to do with discovery,  has many of the same characteristics  and objectives as the pure discovery applications. Marketing intelligence, news sites which point you to related articles, shopping sites which suggest alternative purchases and (as Judge Peck noted) anti-virus software, all include elements of this kind of prediction.

Podcasts give tasters for IQPC’s Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit in London

Patrick Oot of the Electronic Discovery Institute and the SEC is interviewed by Jim Vint of Navigant in a podcast which anticipates some of the subjects which will come up at IQPC’s London Summit between 14 and 16 May

The list of speakers for IQPC’s 7th Annual Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit is pretty good bait on its own, even without looking at the agendas for the Pre-Conference Workshops, Day 1 and Day 2. Even if you do not know the names of the individuals (and you will certainly know some of them) the job titles and the company names make it clear that you will be getting ideas and recommendations from the top.

IQPC has recorded some podcasts in which speakers talk about their subjects. Although these are obviously intended as trailers for the conference sessions, they serve also as useful sources of information in their own right – I interviewed Professor Dominic Regan, for example, and what he said formed the basis for an article which I called Professor Dominic Regan on why the Jackson Reforms mean the biggest ever upheaval for UK litigation.