Short eDiscovery updates to 13 October

Most of these updates on my Google Plus site are from the week ending 6 October. After that, I was at the Masters Conference in Washington and at an event given by Symantec-Clearwell at Tower Bridge, with no time to write. I am content, in fact, to come late to my summary of these short posts – it gives s second life to subjects which would otherwise sink in the Twitter-stream.

I keep a large stock of things to write about thanks to my favourite software product, Evernote – I dip into it whenever there is a spare moment and pull out something to link to. That is fairly easy; the subsequent linking – via LinkedIn and Twitter at the time of publishing, in these updates, and (in due course) in the master list of articles on my web site, is extremely time-consuming and a major addition to my work-load. The payback comes in the form of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) both of my own articles and of those to which I link.

______________________________

TransPerfect acquires Digital Reef for fast processing and ECA tools

In my recent article ILTA 2012 Part 3 – Some market observations I said this:

There are rumours of at least one significant acquisition – by “significant”, I mean that a major player will buy a strong but smaller niche player to give it new markets and not merely talent and client lists.

I would like to say that my antennae had picked up TransPerfect’s acquisition of Digital Reef, which was announced today, but that would not be true. What I had heard was something different and did not identify the target. It is probably not the case either that TransPerfect’s primary motive was the opening of new markets, since TransPerfect seems well able to open new markets anyway.

The acquisition is, however, consistent with the broad idea expressed in my ILTA article – that bigger players will fill the gaps in their market offerings by acquiring the best tools and skills, if necessary by buying the companies which own them. Digital Reef’s Big Data processing power for enterprise-scale eDiscovery and its early case assessment abilities make an attractive addition to TransPerfect’s service offerings.

TransPerfect is a big player with annual revenues of over $300 million. It is the world’s largest privately-held provider of language services and technology solutions with offices in 80 cities on 5 continents. It also has hosting facilities in London and Hong Kong amongst other places.

Digital Reef’s clients will be pleased, I would guess, to have access to the latter as well as to the increased footprint, the support, and the backing for future development. I recall a conversation a long time ago with Ivan O’Sullivan, Chief Operating Officer of Digital Reef and now joining TransPerfect’s senior management team, about his unwillingness to take on projects which Digital Reef would find hard to support for geographic reasons. That brake is now removed.

I await future developments with interest.

Home

Digital Reef adds Predictive Priority, enhances Relativity integration and opens its processing power to LSPs

Digital Reef is offering legal service providers the opportunity to make use of its SaaS processing and early case assessment tools on a revenue sharing basis.  This should help LSPs who find themselves with more work than they can handle and who traditionally have the choice between struggling to manage it all or passing the work to someone else, with the risk of losing the client as well as the fee.

The Digital Reef service – the press release is here – allows LSPs to put their own brand label on processing which is actually undertaken on Digital Reef’s servers, which are capable of handling 17 Tb of data per day.

As I have written elsewhere, UK eDiscovery solutions provider CY4OR has recently acquired the business of eOrigin. That brought with it Nick Pollard as CY4OR’s new head of eDiscovery together with eOrigin’s role as a Digital Reef partner. Nick Pollard said of the new Digital Reef program:

“as a leading provider of Digital Reef to the UK market, we are excited about the innovations that the company is making.  CY4OR is already rolling out a similar model in the UK which is generating a lot of interest amongst Litigation Support teams.  We have the eDisclosure tools and resources in place now to offer our clients the software as a service (SaaS) model and believe it will enable law firms to reap rewards in an increasingly competitive market”.

This is one of a spate of Digital Reef announcements recently. Two press releases came out at the end of January, one announcing closer integration with Relativity and one about Digital Reef’s new predictive priority functionality.  I knew about the latter – indeed I am quoted in the press release – but announcements made once LegalTech has started tend to get overwhelmed by everything happening at the show and in its aftermath (I still have one panel to report on,  and want to come back to the one new application which I actually saw in New York).

These are free-standing developments, each with its own value for what Relativity’s Andrew Sieja describes as giving users “control to construct the best eDiscovery solution to meet their needs”. When the new analytics at the front end are added to the service offered to LSPs and to Relativity integration, Digital Reef seem to have an integrated business plan as well as a technology solution.

Home

CY4OR buys eOrigin and takes Nick Pollard to lead its eDisclosure department

I am not generally much bothered about capturing breaking news, preferring to let it simmer a while before I pass it on.

Yesterday’s announcement that CY4OR has acquired eOrigin and taken founder Nick Pollard onto its management team to manage its eDiscovery department is, however, worth passing on straight away. For the moment, I have little to add to the what is said on CY4OR’s blog and on eOrigin’s website, but I am seeing CY4OR’s Bethan Williams and Nick Pollard in London next week and will find out more then.

eOrigin last appeared in these pages at the beginning of December as the Digital Reef partner who won Digital Reef’s deal with BDO LLP – see UK accountancy firm BDO LLP selects Digital Reef for its eDiscovery work. CY4OR turn up here quite often as I pass on their useful suggestions for both reactive and anticipatory control of data forensics and disclosure.

I will come back with more about this story shortly.

Home

Equivio near duplicate and e-mail threads integrated into Relativity

Equivio and kCura have got in ahead of the LegalTech announcements flurry by launching an Equivio tab In Relativity. “Integration” means just that – Relativity users access Equivio’s analytic functionality without either they or the data leaving Relativity.

The words “efficient” and “seamless” appear in the press release from Equivio and in Relativity’s product information page. Quite apart from the benefits to the user experience, the integration should mean that future developments by both companies should be easily absorbed.

This is one of kCura’s growing number of Ecosystem Applications which include Digital Reef, EnCase eDiscovery by Guidance Software, Nuix , Trident Pro from Wave Software and audio and video forensic search by Nexidia. The Ecosystem was only launched last July, and Relativity’s pulling power continues unabated, with further integrations promised shortly.

Home

UK accountancy firm BDO LLP selects Digital Reef for its eDiscovery work

The London member of business and advisory firm BDO International has taken Digital Reef to support its eDiscovery work. The selection was made through Digital Reef’s UK partner e-Origin.

William Wilkinson, Head of Technology Forensics Services at BDO, said “by processing our eDiscovery work through Digital Reef, we will be able to deal with larger volumes of information in a timelier manner than ever before.”

Digital Reef’s fast processing and analytic capability, with its focus on early case assessment, was not the only reason for the choice. Connectivity with kCura’s Relativity review platform was also significant..

There is further information about this deal here.

BDO is not a firm with which I have had any connection recently. I will leave it a while for the new system to bed in, and then try and get an invitation to find out more about them and their e-Discovery practice.

Home

Digital Reef Panel at the Masters Conference – Early Case Assessment: is it working?

I was a member of a Masters Conference panel brought together by Digital Reef to discuss the question whether early case assessment is working as a way of saving time and money in litigation, as well as for improving its outcomes.

The moderator was Shawnna Childress of Navigant and of Women in EDiscovery. The other panellists were Steve Akers, CTO of Digital Reef, Bill Belt of LeClair Ryan, Browning Marean of DLA Piper US and Michelle Treadwell Briggs of Goodwin Procter.

“Early Case Assessment”, capital letters and all, is one of those expressions which lost all meaning when commandeered by technology marketing departments. It pandered to the idea that there existed a push-button technology solution, and the side-effects included two which were less than helpful: one was that we could defer thinking about cases until they hit us; the other was to make lawyers feel that they were bit-players in a technology solution.

The first of these means that we are always firefighting. Although companies are beginning to realise that there is no realistic alternative to a proper document retention policy and the technology and processes to back it, the reality in many companies is that this involves resources which are not readily available (perhaps because no-one has ever bothered to add up what the fire-fighting is costing – see this article by Katey Wood of ESG which suggests that a simple computation of external legal and ediscovery spend might provoke a different approach to in-house resourcing). Even where there is no in-house capability, companies ought at least to know what they will do on the occurrence of any reasonably foreseeable triggering event – a fire drill to be invoked to aid fire-fighting.

Moderating a video discussion with Digital Reef: Preparing eDiscovery Data for Review

Whilst I was at ILTA in Nashville in August, I moderated an eDiscovery discussion with Steve Akers, CTO of Digital Reef and Peter Mansmann, CEO of Precise Litigation Technologies. Digital Reef has now edited our discussion down into three short videos and published them on its blog under the heading Preparing eDiscovery Data for Review. The three sections appear under the titles An Introduction, Strategies, and Tools and Techniques.

I used the introduction to draw attention to the gap which so often appears between the objectives – the clients’ objectives and those of the court – and the discovery work done by the lawyers in purported compliance with those objectives. US sanctions cases tend to involve some permutation of breaking the rules, failing to produce documents, and less than open behaviour vis-a-vis opponents and the court. It is no less a failure of duty when they disclose too much – throwing piles of irrelevant materials at opponents is often used as a tactic, but it is more often done, I think, because no one applies their mind to the proper scope of discovery. It is not a binary option – disclose it all or get sanctioned; there is a middle ground.

The same is true in the UK, even if we lack the risks which US-style sanctions bring. The courts in both jurisdictions are coming under pressure to hold down the costs of discovery. The paradox is that those who complain about it – the clients – are the very people who could control it, partly by the way they manage information on their own systems, and partly by negativing their lawyers’ assumption that they want them to fight for them in every last ditch. The cost of procedural infighting, when added to a lack of knowledge about what are, after all, the clients’ own documents, can add significantly to litigation costs which do not bear at all on the issues, the merits or the substantive arguments.

The first of the three videos is largely taken up with my observations of this kind. In Parts 2 and 3 I pick the brains of two very experienced players in eDiscovery and invite them to suggest how we might reduce costs and focus on the things which matter.

In what may appear to be an unrelated episode, I recently recorded a webinar for Virtual LegalTech with Bill Belt and Daryl Shetterly of LeClairRyan and with Heather Bryden of Capital One Bank. Its title was Unbundling Litigation: Selecting and Using eDiscovery Counsel, and we focused on the benefits of using specialist lawyers to handle eDiscovery alongside the merits counsel.

The connection is that I am taking part in a panel session on Day 1 of the Masters Conference in Washington along with Steve Akers and Bill Belt with Shawnna Childress of Navigant as moderator. The title is Early Case Assessment (is it working?) and I think it likely that some of the themes from the earlier events will recur in the ECA panel.

Home

ILTA 2011 – the end of the beginning? We’re just getting going

I am back from the annual conference of ILTA, the International Litigation Technology Association, in Nashville, Tennessee.  The original draft of this post said that I was “just back” but (as more than one correspondent has reminded me) time has gone by without any post from me about it or about anything else. Catching up after two back-to-back conferences in opposite corners of the world plus an ever-busier Twitter stream and a few other things have kept me amused.  I will in due course do a couple of posts about the serious stuff at ILTA and I will point you to summaries by others of the product and company news which, however interesting and important, can be dealt with from my desk if it still seems interesting or important by the time I get to it.

Despite the best efforts of the PR people, I don’t cross the world to shut myself up in dark demo rooms or to hit the social scene. The breathless prose of the press releases offers little incentive; I don’t drink much, don’t party more than formal politeness requires, don’t really appreciate most corporate nights out unless they involve a table and a decent menu, and can’t stand shouting above noise. Why do I go each year?, someone asked.

As I have said in an earlier article, I had some formal reasons for going – I sat on a panel for Thomson Reuters and moderated a video session for Digital Reef. The real value, however, lies in ad hoc and informal conversations. Within a few hours of arriving, for example, I had lunch with Amir Milo and Warwick Sharp of Equivio, a conversation with Herb Roitblat of OrcaTec, and an extended early-morning coffee with Howard Sklar of Recommind; those who followed the predictive coding furore of a few weeks ago will note that these companies were in the front line trenches of that energetic debate. I could, in theory at least, ring up any of them for a chat at any time but it is only at ILTA that there is an opportunity for these impromptu discussions.

So what?, you say. You bumped into all your mates and had a nice chat. How pleasant to be able to do that in a grand hotel somewhere hot and call it “work”. Well, it is enjoyable, but it has a serious purpose as well. This post is largely anecdotal and aimed at giving the flavour of the event in the hope of encouraging you to go next year.

Carrying messages

The advertised pitch for the eDisclosure Information Project is that I carry news and views about eDisclosure / eDiscovery between judges, lawyers, clients and those who supply into the market. Some of that is done by sitting on panels, taking part in webinars and other one-to-many exercises; sometimes it involves reporting things which deserve a wider audience such as Judge Peck’s speech at Carmel and those of Singapore’s Chief Justice, of Lord Justice Jackson, and of Senior Master Whitaker at the recent conference in Singapore. Sometimes, however, it lies in one-to-one conversations which you can’t have if you just sit at home writing blog posts.

Talking to Equivio’s Warwick Sharp is like standing beside an expert at a pheasant shoot. Up go the arguments, bang goes the gun, and down they come lifeless to the ground. My role is to be the labrador who retrieves them. Our lunch discussion on that first day was about the arguments advanced against using sophisticated technology like predictive coding – not specifically Equivio’s  product but any of the high-end software applications which take input from senior lawyers on a subset of documents and use it to make relevance and other decisions about the rest. The only plausible argument against the use of such applications, if you discount the self-interest of  lawyers who make their money from setting large teams to read all the documents, is that there is as yet no court decision which expressly approves of the use of such technology.

As Judge Peck noted at Carmel, there is no decision approving the use of keywords either, and both he and Master Whitaker in Singapore addressed this primary objection. Warwick Sharp instead rattled off a list of uses for predictive coding which needed no judicial approval – QA of your own results and a quick assessment of your opponents’ discovery were amongst them. I did not need to go to Nashville to hear this, but there were many who had gone there for just that purpose.  Later that day, I met in quick succession two people whose role within their firms required them to marshal just these kinds of arguments for the benefit of their lawyers, and I passed on what Warwick had said more or less verbatim. That alone justified being there, and you only really get that kind of opportunity at ILTA, where the mix of educational and social events, coupled with the informality and relative leisure which differentiates ILTA from the frantic pace of LegalTech, encourages this kind of discourse.

The venue

The Gaylord Opryland Resort covers 56 acres; it has 2881 guest rooms, 220 suites, an atrium 150 foot high and 4.5 acres in extent plus a second atrium of an acre which comfortably swallows two waterfalls, tropical gardens, a restaurant and a bar; the resort has 15 restaurants in all, a river, and several hundred thousand square feet of exhibit hall and conference facilities. There were people whom I knew to be there amongst the 1200 registered delegates at ILTA whom I did not see at all.

You wouldn’t find me checking in here for a holiday, but the Gaylord resorts are perfect for an event like this, provided that you don’t mind a 20 minute round trip between the conference centre and your room, as I had. The big events  - the opening party, the  big sessions and the final dinner – fitted comfortably into the cavernous rooms but there are plenty of quiet corners for conversation.

ILTA 2011 comes to life at Nashville

ILTA 2011 is slowly coming to life downstairs, but the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center is so large that I am getting my information about it from tweets rather than from my own observation – there could be a London-style riot going on at the other end of this complex and you would not know it. I will put up some photographs in due course, though you really need the wide-angle lens which I left at home to get any impression of this place.

I’m not convinced that I could accurately have pointed to Nashville on a map before planning this journey and, indeed, since I don’t plan my journeys any more (my blessed wife does it for me) the journey just involved following instructions. BA gave me what they call an “involuntary upgrade”, with that curious implication that one might decline the opportunity to sleep horizontally, be offered food which is actually edible, and have access to a power outlet.  Changing terminals at JFK was a doddle thanks to the inter-terminal train, and it is worth recording (because one often hears differently) that the airline and security staff were welcoming and helpful, with apparently spontaneous smiles and offers of help if one looked at all uncertain.

On the small plane from JFK to Nashville I came across Charles Christian of the Orange Rag, the Legal Technology Insider and the American Legal Technology Insider, Rob Lancashire of digital dictation company BigHand, and legal technology writer Joanna Goodman. Charles introduced me to Rob Lancashire as “an expert on digital dictation” which is rather like introducing an occasional car driver to a Formula 1 engineer as an “expert on cars”. I am merely a user, whereas Rob Lancashire is BigHand’s managing director for UK legal and professional services.

Three new sponsors and HP buys Autonomy – all in a week’s work

This was never going to be a relaxing week, sandwiched as it was between a conference in Singapore and ILTA 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee. At least I had written all my Singapore articles by the time I landed at Heathrow at dawn on Monday, with their themes of judge-led litigation processes, judicial intolerance of eDiscovery unreadiness and South East Asian business and educational ambitions.

ILTA is a fixed entry in the calendar of anyone interested in litigation technology. On the surface, it is a more relaxed event than most of the others, taking place in high summer, in casual attire rather than suits, in a resort, and spread over five days. A lot happens there, however, quite apart from the fact that Nashville is a long way from Oxford, England or, indeed, from anywhere – the journey time is the same as to Singapore with the added excitement of having to change terminals at JFK.

Like certain other things – conflicts between my sponsors, the revolting coffee on aeroplanes, and the unwanted attentions of legal PRs – these things go with the territory which I have staked out for myself, and are a small price for involvement in a global business which is worth billions, which I am passionate about, and which is occupied by interesting and likeable people. it is also a young industry, with the opportunity which that brings to make the weather and not merely to report on it.

What makes that possible is my involvement with those companies whose logos appear on the right-hand side of this page. Between them, they cover the full range of software and services used for electronic discovery in every jurisdiction in which discovery is a relevant concept. Their sponsorship does more than provide the time to write and the opportunity to go where the action is. It also gives me a direct line to the senior people in the industry, and the ability to get involved with the development of rules and the connections with judicial thinkers, things which do not of themselves create a viable business.

The addition of three new sponsors in one week may be a coincidence; I think in fact that it tells us something about the state of the eDiscovery and information governance market and the direction in which it is going.

UK and US EDisclosure / EDiscovery and Compliance Commonality at IQPC London

There was something for everyone at the IQPC Document Retention and EDisclosure Management Summit in London this week. The Bribery Act gave added incentive for those responsible for information management within organisations; at the other end of the process, prosecutors and judges from the US and the UK emphasised that the target is not merely formal compliance with court rules but business objectives and business efficacy; in between, the technology begins to appear – at last – as a tool to support the business and procedural requirements and not, as it used to, as a free-standing objective of its own.

We have also finally eradicated the impression that US judges, providers and practitioners are missionaries come to civilise a backward race. We are all in this together, thanks to four specific facets of globalisation: the need to collect data worldwide and the privacy conflicts which that brings; the fact that the dominating new technology for creation and dissemination of data (of which Twitter and Facebook are but two examples) goes global immediately; the convergence of thinking on court-led procedural matters such as co-operation and proportionality; and now the Bribery Act, matching and exceeding the reach and the implications of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. One US visitor said that she had gone away from a previous conference wondering why she had crossed the Atlantic simply to hear other Americans speak; there are still plenty of them here, but their contribution now brings a world view, not merely a US one, to what has become a much more collegiate group of experts.

As always, I went to relatively few sessions beyond the six in which I took part because I use these events as an opportunity to talk to as many people as possible. I mention this not merely to justify my failure to report comprehensively on the whole conference but to emphasise a hidden value in these events, and an overlooked justification for time taken out of the office. Unclear about some particular technology and whether it its use is likely to be acceptable in a court? Talk to a few people who provide it and then to a judge. Not sure whether your company is ahead or behind others in compliance matters? Have a chat with people who hold parallel roles in other companies. There is much more to these events than one-way communication from the platforms.

Three webinars from Digital Reef

Digital Reef, whose ediscovery, early case assessment and compliance software has recently brought them into the KMWorld List of 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management, is producing three webinars over the next few weeks.

These are as follows:

Burst Capacity: the underbelly of the ediscovery beast on 27 April

Balancing in-house and outsourced ediscovery resources on 12 May

SaaS-based ediscovery, effective practices — lessons learned on 20 May

The registration pages for these events can be found on Digital Reef’s home page.

I had lunch in Oxford recently with Charles Lavallée, Digital Reef’s Director, Business Development – US & International, whom I have known since long before his move to Digital Reef. The plan was to show him round Oxford (these visits are the only way I get to see my own home city, so I appreciate them for that reason, as well as for the information I glean whilst doing it), but he had to go back to London earlier than expected. He will be back for the IQPC Information Retention and EDisclosure Summit in London from 9-12 May where Digital Reef is amongst the many exhibitors.

Home

Digital Reef, kCura and Foley & Lardner Webinar on 9 March

I do not catch all the webinar notices which fly by, and get to mention only a fraction of those. That implies no lack of support for the format or for those who put them on, but it is only Tuesday night and I have already this week been side-tracked by two major stories – the ‘Watson’ / Jeopardy! one and the spin-off from the NYT Expensive Lawyers / Cheaper software story – and given a talk in London which I will write up separately. The other major achievement was to miss the talk this evening by Mike Lynch of Autonomy which has been firmly in my diary for months – just not on the right day. I doubt very much that I entered it incorrectly, and I suspect it fell victim to my experiment, painful to set up but ultimately successful, to ensure that calendar and contact data entered in any of Outlook, Google, Blackberry, iCal or iPad all end up in each of those places. I wonder what else I have missed. I will find out in March 2012 perhaps.

There is no chance of your doing the same with the webinar to be given by Digital Reef, kCura and Foley & Lardner, because it happens tomorrow – probably today by the time you see this. Its title is A Playbook for the Fastest Way to Legal Review: Speeding Litigation Processing to Review and Production and it goes out on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 1:00 pm Eastern Standard Time which is 18.00 GMT. There is more information and registration here.

Home

Levelling out after LegalTech

LegalTech, UK educational sessions and calls from law firms, an LPO conference, Irish eDiscovery, litigation as an invisible export, legal blogging in New York and eDiscovery in Germany all help to pass the time.

By and large, I find that the amount of work which has to be done in a year broadly matches the time available to do it. That is in part thanks to variables which I can control – the things I choose to write about as opposed to those which I must cover, and whether I go to bed at 2.00am or 3.00am – and is explained in part by a variant on Parkinson’s Law. That, you will recall, says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. One way of defeating that is to leave important things until the last minute, ticking off the non-urgent things (which would otherwise never get done) so that the time available for completion of the urgent things is reduced. It infuriates conference organisers (for whom everything is apparently needed TODAY) but if I dropped everything to comply with their deadlines, I would never get anything done.

Sometimes, however, tasks stack up like aeroplanes at dawn over Heathrow (an example I pick with particular feeling after my last aimless circling of the Home Counties). February is invariably one of those times, thanks to the cuckoo which is LegalTech. Its three days always take at least two weeks of my life in preparing for sessions, getting there, being there and writing about it afterwards. The result is an uneven spread in my articles – I wrote six in one day just before I left but only two in the ten days after my return. I get bullied, you know. It took a while to do my report on LegalTech and, just before I published it, I received an e-mail saying “I sense some collective thumb-twiddling amongst your readers – the biggest show in town has come and gone and the site is still welcoming Digital Reef etc” (a reference to the last post which I did before I left, about new e-Disclosure Information Project sponsor Digital Reef). It is some consolation to find that Andrew Haslam has only just published his account.

It is worth, occasionally, just running through what is happening, to show how many subjects get swept together under the umbrella of electronic disclosure. It touches on a lot of topics, as the extract below from my slide set shows. I do not disdain PowerPoint, as has become fashionable, and use my slides at educational sessions to allow me to canter over the ground more or less without taking breath – the audience can always ask me back for expansion on discrete subjects.

Welcome to Digital Reef as a sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project

I am very pleased to welcome Digital Reef as the newest sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project. This news comes in as I am packing to leave for LegalTech and you, and they, will forgive me for giving the briefest of notices to draw attention to their arrival on these pages.

Their own description of themselves will serve as a good summary introduction. It reads:

Corporate, legal, and IT organizations use Digital Reef for the fastest way to reduce the time, cost and risk associated with locating, organizing and governing information for eDiscovery, compliance, records management or proactive file management/ migration.

I will be meeting up with them (again) – this relationship has not sprung up from nowhere – at LegalTech in a day or two, and will be able to write a more thoughtful piece then.

Home

Roundup of The Masters Conference 2010

“We have been travelling since we saw you last. We have been in America, entertaining the Americans whose need, let’s face it, is greater even than yours. Of course when we’re over there we say that the other way round”

That is how Michael Flanders opened Flanders & Swann’s second selection of comic songs At the Drop of Another Hat in London in 1963. They seem successfully to have crossed the Atlantic divide despite a style which was rooted so firmly in English traditions of education and culture that it more or less excluded the Welsh, Irish and Scotch; the verses to their Song of Patriotic Prejudice – “The English are best” (lyrics and video) would today bring complaints from some humourless official who would investigate it as incitement to racial hatred and arrange a compulsory diversity course. Fashions change in these things – has Hollywood at last given up casting a well-spoken Englishman as the villain in every film? The devolution of powers within the UK, the subservience to Europe which culminated in the Treaty of Lisbon, and Blair’s shameful grovelling to Bush have left us without influence in areas which we used to dominate. Perhaps that is why I am so keen that we should be heard in my own field.

I am just back from Washington, where Master Whitaker and I flew the English and Welsh (but not Scottish or Irish) edisclosure/ediscovery flag at the Masters Conference.  We were joined by an Australian judge, Justice Einstein, of the Commercial List in the Supreme Court of New South Wales.  I am not sure that anyone in the US would have been interested two or three years ago. Before then, as I said in opening my International Judicial Panel, US judges would come to London to tell us, in a rather de haut en bas way, how we should be handling electronic discovery, and English lawyers and judges reacted by disdaining the whole subject. The tide turned with a judicial panel which I organised with Guidance Software in 2008, when we put Judge Grimm and Judge Facciola from the US on a panel with Master Whitaker and HHJ Simon Brown QC from the UK. Since then, we have tapped into and shared not just each other’s thinking, but the developments in other common law jurisdictions; bringing Justice Einstein from Australia to a US platform marked a further step towards pooling judicial thought on this shared problem.

The Masters Conference has grown over the same period to be a very good forum for just this level of thinking. It is big enough to attract a good range of speakers, delegates and sponsors; it is thoughtful without being overbearingly intellectual; the mix of law, technology and practicality is about right; it recognises the importance of local interests without forgetting that there is a wider world out there which is important to US interests both as a market and as a source of ideas.

I give a brief account of the sessions which I attended – I usually do separate posts about individual sessions, but there were thematic links running through them which then would be lost.

ILTA 2010 wrap

This is my third (and last) article about ILTA 2010 Strategic Unity which closed in Las Vegas last week. My first article was a scene-setter, designed to give the flavour of the event and to explain why I thought it important for the UK to know what is going on in the legal technology market. The second article was largely devoted to the two sessions which I attended, on defensibility and on cloud computing. This article is about some of the people, companies and products which I came across.

I am not here solely concerned with my home market, the UK, but that well illustrates the growing need for lawyers to know something about the range of legal technology providers. The cumulative effect of the new practice direction and electronic documents questionnaire and of some recent cases (the ones I characterise as the “incompetence cases”, turning more on sloppiness and ignorance than on fine points of law), is that many UK lawyers will make their first acquaintance with electronic disclosure during the coming year. It is not, of course, that the problems have been invented by the cases or by the changes to the rules; most potentially disclosable documents are electronic, and few cases can be conducted proportionately by printing and reading them all.

If many UK lawyers will make their first call to a provider of litigation software or services for the first time over the next 12 months, their US counterparts will be making similar calls. The US case law continually raises the bar, not because it is binding on other courts, but because it redefines the standard of care expected of lawyers generally; clients expect more for less in the US as in the UK; the technology evolves continually; every player snipes at its rivals’ costs models, but competition keeps overall costs stable at worst; companies merge with and acquire each other, and individuals move from one provider to another. It is hard enough to keep up even if you already have experience of electronic discovery.

E-Disclosure in Liverpool with Cats Legal, Epiq Systems and Dominic Regan

I have to take back what I said yesterday about my rail trip to Liverpool. I had expected the usual shambles, those delays with risible explanations and insincere apologies which are the norm on our overcrowded, badly-run rail network. In the event, the trains ran on time and the connections went smoothly. The new government’s warning to Network Rail directors about their obscene bonuses will obviously not keep their noses out of the trough, but may force them to pay some attention to the poor sods who have to travel with them.

A point did arise about my journey, however, which relates directly to something which came up at the e-disclosure seminar which was its purpose. It concerns transparency of pricing and the potential user’s uninformed expectation as to the costs of engaging any litigation software or services provider. My expectation from the railway bookings web site was that my return ticket would cost £247 (a three-hour journey, followed by three hours performing on my feet, followed by a three-hour journey back, warrants a first class seat, away from the unwashed masses dribbling dogburger slime down their chins whilst they boast loudly of their sex lives on their mobile phones). Face-to-face across the counter, however, the ticket seller told me that, by adjusting my departure time a little, I could get the ticket for £134, and now that I go back and look more closely, I see that this information was buried on the web site.

The point is that I only found out the true cost by speaking to somebody, and it was very much lower than I expected. This came up during the seminar when Cats Legal and Epiq Systems made it clear that many of the jobs which they do are for relatively small matters and for fees which are low relative to what can be achieved and what can be saved. The only way lawyers will find that out is by ringing up a supplier (or preferably more than one), outlining the task, and asking for an estimate. Armed with that estimate, they can make proper decisions as to the most proportionate route, decisions which inform internal strategy as well as discussions with opponents and the court. You need this information also when the boot is on the other foot and your opponents argue that proper electronic disclosure would be too expensive. That may be true, but if they have not sought quotations, how can they make that assertion?

E-Disclosure law, practice and technology in one educational package

The first of the E-disclosure seminars organised jointly by Professor Dominic Regan and me took place yesterday at Ely Place Chambers. Dominic and I were joined by Senior Master Whitaker and by speakers from three technology providers, 7Safe, Legal Inc and FTI Technology to bring together the law, the practice and the technology in one afternoon session.

The expressed rationale for the e-Disclosure Information Project is to bring together all those with an interest in making electronic disclosure efficient and cost-effective. That crossover is important -  knowledge of Part 31 CPR and its practice direction is a good start, and the increasing number of cases involving e-disclosure failures send a strong warning to lawyers. Lord Justice Jackson drew attention to the need for more active case management by judges, and the proposed new practice direction and ESI Questionnaire raise the temperature on that front. Meanwhile, the technology reduces in cost as it increases in capability and, if properly used, maps well to the steps which parties and the court must take together, first to decide on the scope of disclosure and then to achieve it. The case management itself must be proportionate to what is involved.

Cats Legal partners with Digital Reef

I wrote recently about Cats Legal, the combination of established print solutions provider Cats Solutions and litigation support provider LDSI (see Cats Solutions combines with LDSI to become Cats Legal).  My planned meeting with Mark Wagstaff of Cats Legal had to be postponed, so I have yet to visit the new operation. What I have had, however, is a press release from Digital Reef announcing a partnership with Cats Legal.

Cats Legal obviously intends to hit the ground running if this deal is anything to go by. Digital Reef brings a range of solutions for handling data for e-Discovery / e-Disclosure. Apart from its scalability (it can apparently process as much as 10 TB per day in some cases), it can be brought into use very quickly, making data available to a company and its lawyers in the timescales imposed by regulatory investigations as well as for litigation and internal investigations.

Legal Inc takes Digital Reef

Amongst the many applications at LegalTech which I was invited to look at but could not fit in was Digital Reef, which allows organisations to identify, collect, process, analyse and review data in place. The advantage of this, obviously, is that they need only move or export relevant information.

Digital Reef is not the only player in this space. I was interested, as much as anything, because Charles Lavallée, whom I knew from his time at CT Summation, has moved to Digital Reef and it was his invitation which I was unable to accept.

It looks as if I will get my chance on this side of the Atlantic because  Legal Inc has signed a hosting and reseller agreement with Digital Reef as part of their strategy to provide clients with a case management solution which begins at the client’s own data stores.

I have heard good things of Digital Reef from elsewhere, and if it is good enough for Legal Inc then it is worth looking at. I will do so and report back.

Home