This is the last of my series of articles about the ILTA conference in Washington in August. What else is ILTA doing around the world?
ILTA has recently partnered with ALM, the owners of LegalTech. Apart from LegalTech itself, the next of these events is LegalTech Asia 2013 on March 4-5 at the JW Marriott in Hong Kong. I intend to be there.
ILTA also runs an event in London each year. Called ILTA Insight, this was a deliberately modest one-day event until this year when, again in partnership with ALM, ILTA put on a two-day event – the only one in the UK which attempts to bring eDiscovery / eDisclosure and the other components of legal technology together under one roof. We do not yet have a date for ILTA Insight 2013, but preliminary discussions suggest that it will be an attractive show for exhibitors and delegates alike, and across the whole legal IT field including eDisclosure / eDiscovery.
You do not need to wait until then. Regional Vice President Gareth Ash of Allen & Overy is keen to expand the membership of ILTA in the UK and Europe. As I suggested in an earlier article, if membership has benefits for Allen & Overy, Wragges and Bond Pearce then it has potential benefits for you, whatever the size of your firm. Why not drop Gareth Ash a line?
This is the fourth of five articles about ILTA 2012. Whatever may happen at other awards dinners, this one celebrates the people who lead by an example in an industry which needs them.
ILTA ends with a big dinner, with a comedian and awards. Between you and me, those elements usually add up to an event which I would cross the Atlantic to avoid. For the ILTA Peer Awards dinner, however, I am always prepared to stay an extra night when I could be asleep on an aeroplane heading home.
The draw is not generally the food or the comedian, though both were good. I go to support the principle that ILTA is a peer-driven organisation which encourages those who have the expertise to share it with others, and I am prepared to sit through the sonorous intonations of the announcer on the grandiloquent linking videos to see individuals, firms and companies singled out for taking a lead. The UK was up there – Bond Pearce was shortlisted for a couple of awards and Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy was in the top three for Litigation and Practice Support Champion, an award which went to Paige Hunt Wojcik of Perkins Cole. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the first of five articles about ILTA 2012 in Washington D.C. Why do we go, what is it like, what conclusions can one draw about the market? The main aim is to encourage you to go next year, and to find out in the mean time what ILTA can offer you apart from its big conference.
If asked to explain what their father does, my children generally say “He’s a blogger”, ducking the inevitable follow-on question “No, I mean what does he do for work?”. If they were to add that he wanders around hotel lobbies having brief encounters with several people in succession, that does not make it clearer. That, however, was my major benefit at the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, ILTA, in Washington D.C. at the end of August. Everyone is there.
There is more to ILTA’s annual conference than that of course, just as there is more to ILTA than its annual conference. You can make of it what you like: seeing technology solutions, attending sessions led by people who have been down that roll-out path ahead of you, hearing about the pros and cons of a proposed investment from those who have been there, or just talking to others. When you have done all that (and this is a hard-working conference for all its leisure elements) there is entertainment of pretty well every kind.
I do not propose in this post to recite all the people I met or the products which I saw – apart from the obvious risk of drawing fire from those whom I fail to mention (it happens), I value my readership, and nothing drives the audience away faster than lists. ILTA is not a place for big product launches, nor do you get startling pronouncements from influential figures. It is more a place for knowledge-sharing and, as one law firm person put it to me, for spending time with the more thoughtful people from the suppliers.
My purpose here is to give some impression of what it is like to attend ILTA’s big conference, with the aim of encouraging greater attendance from the UK (and anywhere else) next year. I will mention a couple of sessions and pass on some general ideas which came my way in the course of my many discussions, but the main aim is to try and convey why it is important to be here, and not just for Americans. Read the rest of this entry »
I must start with my usual proviso to the effect that generalisations which are critical of groups do not exclude the possibility that those groups contain many people who would shine anywhere, and vice versa. Whilst I am instinctively for private enterprise and against the big state, there are plenty of good people providing essential services in the public sector and rather too many crooks and incompetents in the private sector.
There, that’s got the balance out of the way. You have probably gathered that I am no great admirer of UK local authorities or, indeed, of any public body which has power to govern our lives and spend our money without any concomitant grasp of the commercial principles which govern private enterprises and, too often, without much thought or intelligence. The conventional riposte is that the public service is “different” and not susceptible to the ways of private enterprise, which many public servants despise with a ferocity which matches the contempt felt for them. I am certainly ready to accept that the public services must necessarily be different in many ways, but I cannot see that incompetence and inefficiency must be amongst the inevitable distinguishing features. Local authorities operate right under our noses; we pay them very large sums (over £2,600 pa in my case) on one day and watch them pissing it up against the wall on the next.
Geoff Wild, Director of Governance & Law at Kent County Council addressed these views head-on at LawTech Camp London, effectively accepting that the common view from outside was not always unjustified. Local authorities have the reputation, he accepted, of being wasteful, slow and unresponsive, bogged down in red tape, bureaucracy and process. Councillors are “white, middle-class and with an average age of 68″ – what hope here for change and entrepreneurship? The sense of self-importance and exclusivity is preserved by expressions like “gateway review” and “stakeholder agreement” which were designed to keep others out. You begin to see the parallels with lawyers at once. Read the rest of this entry »
The advance publicity for Lawtech Camp London 2012 was perhaps not calculated to draw in lawyers of the conventional kind, even without the fact that the none of the possible meanings of “Camp” are exactly redolent of commercial activity.
“What do we have here?”, they would say. Some geeky-looking academics and wild-eyed futurists (and what do they know about commercial life?); unconventional presentation modes lasting for only 6 minutes (how can you make serious points in only 6 minutes?); a token speaker from the public services (that’s a joke, right?); probably just some healthy biscuits to eat all day (no wonder these academics look undernourished); and Richard Susskind (that chap who likes to tell millionaires that they have got their business models wrong). I’ll give it a miss, thanks, they would say, I have a business to run.
Well, they would have been right about the wholesome biscuits, but since the entire day was both unsponsored and free, that gives rise only to the minor complaint that we might have been warned to bring our own lunch. Everything else about Lawtech Camp London was excellent and inspiring, and (apart from the fact that my early departure gave me the opportunity to supplement the biscuits) I was sorry to have to leave early – in order , as it happens, to deliver an entirely conventional talk to a law firm. Read the rest of this entry »
ILTA is the International Legal Technology Association. I am now back from ILTA 2010 Strategic Unity in Las Vegas, which was as busy and as good as ever. The red hot bloggers and tweeters were reporting on events as they happened. As usual, I prefer to wait and see what I can still remember a few days later, and to write about what interests me rather than what is seen objectively as important. My background post What happens in Las Vegas matters in the UK was a play on the old saying that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. These days, what happens in Vegas stands a good chance of being on FaceBook or Twitter in minutes, and the nearest I came to vice involved a new taste for cocktails, and cheesecake for breakfast (not, as my first draft had it, “cocktails and cheesecake for breakfast”, which just goes to show the importance of proper punctuation).
This avoidance of vice owed nothing to innate virtue. Between the educational sessions, the formal meetings, the social events and the random rencontres, there was no time for the more traditional Vegas pursuits of gambling, shopping, spur-of-the-moment marriage and energetic physical interaction with broad-minded fellow-delegates. I must improve my time-management next time. Read the rest of this entry »
An outraged e-mail came in from Dominic Regan early on Saturday morning. Headed “The most stupid comment of the year”, Dominic’s message drew attention to the report in the Times about the Saville Inquiry into the Northern Ireland shootings. The report included a quotation about the Inquiry’s use of technology: “without it, the tribunal would have had to be more focused”. I will not take up space with the exclamation marks with which Dominic followed this.
What do you think the author of this comment meant? Did the tribunal lose sight of its remit because technology was used? If the whole thing had been done from paper, would the tribunal have concentrated more closely? Does technology blur the vision – if so, then a visit to the optician is called for, not a woolly implication that technology encourages loss of focus.
I have binned the paper, and the Times web site is no longer accessible, so I don’t know who made the comment or what weight to attach to it. Its supposed author may have been misquoted. Its context is a negative one, so I assume that a negative meaning was intended. I just don’t know what it does mean.
It is curiously reminiscent of the sort of thing you hear from technology-deniers in other civil procedure contexts – you can just imagine a judge resisting the use of technology in litigation on the grounds that lawyers were much more focused in the days when everything was printed and filed in ring binders and read by eye. Actually, you do not have to imagine it.
The most powerful single message from ILTA INSIGHT 2010, held in London yesterday, was that lawyers risk becoming merely part of the clients’ processes in a slot marked “insert lawyer here”. Technology must become part of the lawyers’ business processes, and not merely an adjunct to them.
ILTA INSIGHT 2010 took place yesterday at the Grange Hotel St Paul’s Hotel. Peggy Wechsler and her team put on an interesting programme, as ever, at an event which always manages simultaneously to be friendly but challenging. ILTA’s scope is much wider than my own specialist subject, e-Disclosure, embracing every aspect of bringing technology to the business of being a lawyer and, in consequence, has a delegate contingent which is wider than I usually see. There is a greater emphasis on law-firms-as-businesses, which tends to be side-lined at pure e-Disclosure conferences. It deserves a place there – the internal decision-making about this aspect of the litigation process should be driven as much by the firm’s own costs as by those incurred by the clients.
The British election has so far not thrown up a single defining slogan, that killer combination of words which simultaneously captures the mood and skewers an opponent. Abby Ewen of Simmons & Simmons came up with one at an ILTA INSIGHT session led by Charles Christian of Legal Technology Insider and the Orange Rag blog. The context was the identification of things which lawyers are good at, as opposed to all those other things which they do as part of their traditional work for clients and to the (relatively novel) idea that they are running a business. Abby said that “not much of what lawyers do is all that clever stuff they went to university to learn”. It was important, she said, to “try and extract the things which lawyers are not very good at”. The corollary to that is that the clients are only interested in those things which the lawyers are good at, so that they, and the charging rates which go with them, are applied only when necessary. Read the rest of this entry »
ILTA INSIGHT 2010 takes place on 27 April at the Grange St Paul’s Hotel. INSIGHT 2010 is ILTA’s 5th annual event in the UK and brings a pocket-sized and UK-focussed version of the excellent main ILTA conference, which I go to every year in the US.
It is an opportunity to hear from leading technologists and business strategists, from the UK and the US, who will share their expertise on matters of great interest to the legal profession. The main event so far as I am concerned (I am allowed to say this in an e-Disclosure blog) is a session called Technology as a Component in Lord Justice Jackson’s e-Disclosure Recommendations in which Senior Master Whitaker and I will discuss the technology aspects of e-Disclosure developments in England & Wales. In this area of case management, you cannot separate the operation of the rules and the use of technology – you have only to look at Master Whitaker’s own judgment in Goodale v Ministry of Justice (I wrote about it in Goodale v MoJ – a template judgment for active management of eDisclosure) to see that some understanding of the available technology solutions is required by judges and practitioners alike. This point was made by Lord Justice Jackson in his recent Report on Litigation Costs, whose only express recommendation on the subject was for education. The Jackson Report, the proposed new Practice Direction and ESI Questionnaire (the latter was annexed to the Goodale judgment) and some other recent cases will all be covered in our session.
There is plenty else going on, as the ILTA INSIGHT brochure shows. Other sessions include: The Evolution of Office, Traversing the Generation Divide, Business Processes (BPM, BPA and BI), The Future of the Traditional Desktop, 21st Century Collaboration, the Electronic Working in the RCJ, Electronic Evidence – Preservation to Production, and a presentation by LITIG on their Review of Case and Matter Management Systems.
There is no fee for law firm and law department professionals to attend this event, but space is limited. Registering online at www.iltanet.org/INSIGHT2010, or by e-mail to Peggy Wechsler at peggy@ILTAnet.org.
Marketing legal IT solutions has more in common with marketing a political party than one might think – the product in both cases is something which the target audience would like to be able to do without, and all the products look the same from the perspective of the uncommitted would-be buyer. In both cases, the “suppliers” all suffer from the adverse impression left by the others, and in both cases, overall impression matters more than the detail. The advertisers need to give more thought to the arrival of the message as well as the delivery – what does it sound like to the would-be buyer?
My recent article Using marketing to make people hate you brought me concerned messages from two companies who thought that I was aiming at them. Both of them, as it happens, are people who produce marketing material which is the more useful for being restrained and to the point and, as I assured one of them, if I had strong views about the marketing material of anybody known to me, I would tell them, not the world.
Meanwhile, my primary target in that post, the US translations company which is crowding out the limited attention span of the e-Discovery market, continues to pour its dross into our inboxes. The record is four Google alerts about them in a single message, each as badly written as the last. I hope they get a contract soon, as in someone taking out a contract on them. Read the rest of this entry »
Raconteur has produced an excellent supplement for today’s Times on Legal Efficiency which includes a report by Professor Dominic Regan of an interview with me. Having, as I do, the luxury of writing about anything I choose, it is good occasionally to have a discussion agenda set by someone else. Dominic is a skilled interviewer, and his questions picked out what matters.
That is true also of the others whose comments appear in the supplement, which is a very readable encapsulation of the issues which lawyers face in delivering affordable legal services to clients whilst preserving profitability. The clients do not necessarily read articles aimed at lawyers, but they do read the Times.
This is just a quick mention to make sure you get a copy whilst it is still on the stands. I will do a fuller summary later.
I mentioned in passing in my post of last night that I am to interviewed by Dominic Regan for a special report which Raconteur are publishing on Thursday 25 March in The Times newspaper. Called Legal Efficiency, it will look at, amongst other things, Lord Justice Jackson’s Report on the costs of Litigation, technology such as that required for e-disclosure, and litigation funding.
The report will consider how both law firms and general counsel can improve their efficiency to reduce costs, save time and improve results. It will discuss the way law firms bill their clients, the changing role of barristers chambers, alternative business structures and legal process outsourcing. The report will also look at the emergence of litigation funding to bring access to justice for smaller claimants/ defendants as well as increasing efficiency for larger companies. It will look at ATE and BTE insurance from the perspectives of the Jackson Report and those whom it affects. Finally, there will be specific treatment of e-disclosure, document review, early case assessment, business continuity, workflow management and other technology for law firms and corporate legal departments alike.
Going out on the same day as The Times’ legal section, it should be a very informative awareness piece, which will undoubtedly receive a lot of attention that is very timely indeed.
The Legal Technology Awards list is out. The number of categories, providers and products may seem bewildering, but their web sites give a good idea of what they do. Follow some links and see what maps to the problems which your firm or company faces.
The Legal Technology Awards come in two waves, the juried awards (broadly for individuals, law firm departments, inspired uses of technology and so on) and the vendor categories which are voted for by those who use them. There are about 33 categories and up to three awards in each of the vendor categories. I will not list them all because Monica Bay has already done that here for the juried awards and here for the vendor awards. Read the rest of this entry »
John Craske, Head of Business IT at Dundas & Wilson LLP has contributed a guest article to the Orange Rag which hints at disappointment in the Scottish Civil Courts Review.
I wrote briefly about the Report of the Scottish Civil Courts Review on 7 October, shortly after its publication (see Scottish Civil Courts Review), and promised further comment in due course. I drafted an article about one aspect which interested me – the role of the courts in mediation, on which the Report and I come down on the same side in what has become known as the Woolf v Genn debate – but somehow never quite got back to it.
This was, I think, because there was disappointingly little in the Report about either the use of court technology or about electronic discovery. The report acknowledged the need for better case management, but my overriding feeling, without reading the chunky second part in detail, was that technology, whether of courts or in the hands of parties, had been ducked, with a few laudable statements as to how important it might all prove one day. Read the rest of this entry »
How many judges do you know who might write a PhD thesis with the title Technology for Justice: How Information Technology Can Support Judicial Reform, discuss it on her blog, and promise to inform you of its publication by Twitter. Not many, I suspect.
Although I do my own summaries of the conferences I take part in, it is more interesting in some ways to see what other people take away from them. A succinct summary from an interested party who was present as a delegate picks out what came across as the important strands – if you are organsing and chairing it, the whole thing is important.
Nick Patience from the independent technology-industry analyst company The 451 Group has done a post called e-Discovery conference thoughts in which he highlights a few points from the recent Thomson Reuters e-Disclosure Forum which struck him as being interesting, important or both. I would in turn pick out a couple of those for closer focus. Read the rest of this entry »
A large pub gathering of most of the London litigation support industry prompts some thoughts on the state of the industry and on what makes a buyer new to the market choose one supplier rather than another
If the Larder in Clerkenwell had collapsed last night, almost the whole of the UK litigation support industry would have gone with it. Bill Onwusah of Lovells, whose idea it was, thought he was being optimistic in reckoning that 25 people might turn up in response to his invitation for “an evening of convivial conversation”. As the evening began, he revised the estimate to 45. We all lost count, but the final figure was much higher than that. What probably drew in the crowds was the rider “if you can’t manage anything convivial we will settle for an evening of the usual backbiting and sniping”. Read the rest of this entry »
I wonder what was the first legal technology development reported by Charles Christian. A new design of quill pen perhaps which, coupled with a revolutionary advance in parchment development, allowed legal clerks to write on both sides of a document at once. It might have been the outsourcing of Inner Temple deed production to monks recently made redundant by the nationalisation of the monasteries, or a steam-driven calculating machine for keeping trust accounts.
His acerbic observations on the legal technology market have been pouring out apparently for ever. His audience is legal IT professionals — the people who develop, sell, buy, implement, support and manage legal IT systems within law firms and in-house legal departments. It is unlikely that any medium-to-large law firm technology purchase in the UK has taken place without reference to the Legal Technology Insider and, more recently, the Orange Rag blog. Read the rest of this entry »
The current edition of the American Technology Insider is out, with Charles Christian’s report on ILTA 2009 and some spending statistics which are realistic rather than cheery in the short-term at least. There is also, as always, a succinct summary of the latest industry news.
The American Technology Insider introductory page explains what is covered in ALTi, and how you can get one delivered to your mailbox for free. There is also a section headed “For PR and marketing departments” which makes it clear that ALTi is news-driven rather than led by advertising.
The British version seems to have been around for ever. The means of publication may have changed but the format and the style remains as it began, probably with a report of the implications for lawyers of Charles Babbage’s planned Differential Engine in 1822. There is no obvious reason to change a formula which works and, more than a year after the launch of the American edition, that formula seems to go down well there as well.
Consistent with its own emphasis on short, snappy reports, the new edition of ALTi carries a quotation from Donna Payne of the Payne Group: “If you can’t demo a product in 15 minutes, you don’t have a product”. The point, I think, is not so much whether you have a product as whether you can get an audience for it. I went round the ILTA booths asking for 15 minute demos. They all seemed a bit taken aback by this, but I have to say that they all rose well to the challenge.
There are two halves to the question “How was ILTA for you?”. One is the personal reaction. Did I learn something and see some interesting technology? Did I meet interesting people? Did I have fun? The answer to all these questions is Yes, as I expected. The more serious question concerns the state of the industry, by which I mean the lawyers who are involved in e-discovery for litigation and regulation and their clients as well as those who provide software and services to them. Let’s take the easy bit first.
I am luckier than most at ILTA. I have no responsibilities apart from talking to pleasant people about a subject in which I am interested. I have no stands to put up and man; I do not have to do any hard selling or make any buying decisions; such formal meetings as I have are a pleasure rather than a burden; I do not have projects running back in the office and anxious clients to keep contact with; I have no staff to be responsible for nor is anyone responsible for me. My sole “duty” is to see people I know and like, to meet people I do not know, and to write about some of it afterwards.
On that basis, I am easily pleased. The venue was just fine, the organisation impeccable, the sessions and booths interesting, and I was in conversation with agreeable people from arrival to departure except when I chose to sit quietly writing. A lawyer from the US, the UK, or anywhere else where documents are collected for civil proceedings could have informed him or herself at any level – those new to the subject get a gentle immersion which they can take at their own pace, whether in sessions, by going round the stands or by just talking to others; those who want a higher level of learning, technology or discussion can easily find it. Read the rest of this entry »
I am not going to give you a full report of Richard Susskind’s talk to ILTA last week. Its basic premise is well-known to anyone interested in this area; I have written about it before; if you are interested, you would have read the book; and anyway, recording a Susskind speech is like trying to catch Niagara in a bucket. If you are not interested in what he says, then you will be dead commercially within five years anyway, whether you are in-house counsel responsible to the board, or a law firm hoping to receive instructions. This does not mean that you have to agree either with Susskind’s premises or his conclusions, but you do need to know what the arguments are.
Richard is not, it seems, much taken by my comparison between him and Private Frazer (see Richard Susskind End of Lawyers resources. Of course, (and as I acknowledged) a précis which characterises his message simply as one simply of doom ignores the fact that the title of his book The End of Lawyers? ends in a question mark. Even that chap who used to wander along Oxford Street with a banner proclaiming the imminent end of the world offered redemption to those who repented, and Susskind does the same. Redemption however, whether in business terms or in the wider spiritual context, lacks a simple road-map. We do not even have a destination, just the certainty that where we are is not the place to be. Recognising that much is a good start.
Instead of summarising the lot, I will pick one or two of the points which Richard Susskind made which seemed to me to have particular relevance in the litigation support context. Read the rest of this entry »
The Litigation Support Peer Group had a session at ILTA09 called The Future of Our Litigation Support Profession: What Lies Ahead? These are the people who actually do the work, so their reports and their views are worth having. They, and the high-level recruiter who sat with them, were optimistic, and that looks like more than mere hype.
What is interesting about discovery and electronic discovery, at least from where I sit, is that it embraces everything from state policy down to the minutiae of data handling, passing on the way some sophisticated technology, board-level strategy in law firms and their clients, and wider concepts like justice, winning and the like. It is also interesting, however, in career terms and in how firms and companies set up, structure and run the business unit which handles disclosure / discovery. Amidst all these high-flown business, technical and philosophical areas are people, in ones and twos or in teams, who are actually doing the work. Lest the reference to “business unit” may seem to imply big teams in grand departments, I see it as embracing also a single person in a small firm whose management is of projects and outsiders rather than of internal teams and who does not have to have responsibility for staff to need the tactical and strategic skills which were discussed in the session.
The Litigation Support Peer Group of ILTA is run by and for people like this. One of the many things that is interesting about the industry is that few have grown old working in it because it is itself too young (they may feel that they have aged fast, but that is a different point; Browning Marean claims to be 36, for example). Those in senior positions in litigation support have, by and large, transferred across either from the pure law side or from IT. Every firm has developed its own way of doing things, and three of those sitting on the panel are examples of those who have forged careers and taken on responsibility in what is a whole new area of practice. Read the rest of this entry »
No time to précis it or comment on it, but George Socha and Tom Gelbmann have published their annual overview of the results of their annual survey on the Legal Technology News site.
If asked to pick the most important single observation from it, I would pick the shortage of expertise in the market-place, with providers, law firms and corporates reported as fighting each other for the few people who actually understand what is involved in handling electronic documents. That is important because it can only grow as a problem as we come out of recession. You can take or leave the predictions of 20% or 25% growth which some of the Socha-Gelbmann respondents apparently predict (I am prepared to take them myself) but it is certain that a generation of skilled and knowledgable people is not going to spring from nowhere.
I will give a more thoughtful assessment when I get back from ILTA in Washington. At the moment, my focus is rather more on clearing my decks before heading for the airport.
Guidance Software’s new EnCase Portable is interesting enough for itself. The way in which they are promoting it is even more so. The industry as a whole could make use of YouTube’s ability to point users to related material.
I happened to be with Guidance Software on the day that they announced EnCase Portable the new pocket-sized version of their forensic collection application EnCase, at a meeting of their Strategic Advisory Board at CEIC in Orlando in May. We were given a preview of the extremely neat kit — one USB drive containing EnCase and another to hold the data. The ability to put a forensic collection of data into your pocket looks like a proposition which should sell itself.
A couple of weeks earlier, I had written an article called the Untapped potential of YouTube as a promotional medium . The immediate context was the launch that week of a song called What Really Matters to Me by The Phoenix Fall, whose drummer is my son Charlie (it did very well, thank you for asking, and the second one is due out soon). The more important theme of my article, however, was that YouTube offered an instantly accessible promotional vehicle which went far beyond music videos. I raised, but quickly dismissed, the idea that Sir Rupert Jackson might launch his Preliminary Report (which was due out the next day) via a YouTube broadcast, but omitted to mention that Senior Master Whitaker once did a brief YouTube video about e-disclosure. Read the rest of this entry »
I am not sure how they keep the standard up, but CaseCentral has been publishing a constant stream of cartoons about e-discovery which must have done wonders for their profile. If I copied every one I liked, I would by now have run out of my allocation of storage space.
A recent one called The e-discovery black box encapsulates well the lawyer’s understanding of what goes on between asking “the system” a question and getting the answer. Charles Christian has beaten me to its republication, and it is easier to link to his copy than to make my own.
My experience of trying voice recognition software again after a failed experiment some years ago, has messages for those who have not caught up with developments in litigation support software.
I have come back to voice recognition software after many years of assuming that it was an unwieldy and inaccurate method of transferring words from head to screen. I am immediately hooked and regret all those years spent crouched over a keyboard. Or do I? Is it possible that I have come back to it just at the point where it has reached a level of accuracy which is adequate for my needs, and just when those needs are greatest?
The e-disclosure context here is all those potential users of litigation support applications who dip their toes into the water once and retreat vowing never to try again. Some inadequacy, ranging from an outright system failure which lost their case through to a minor annoyance which became too tiresome to tolerate put them off, often with cries of “I told you so” ringing in their ears. Read the rest of this entry »
This column, as you may have noticed, is deeply attached to the old principles of discovery of documents as a means of bringing evidence before the court. It is also a determined advocate of new ways of managing it. The US has tended to look on our rules and practice as rather quaint. As the gloss comes off the American way, however, there is a new appreciation of the British approach.
My title comes from a 1968 song by the Kinks. The Village Green Preservation Society included the lines
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
The Kinks were past their prime by 1968, with Waterloo Sunset and Sunny Afternoon behind them. It was the year in which Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were new, and the nostalgia and sentiment of The Village Green Preservation Society were deliberately out of the mainstream, championing old virtues in a style redolent of an older (and perhaps non-existent) past. The previous year’s Summer of Love and flowers in your hair may in truth have been pretty unsophisticated concepts, but they seemed very modern compared with Ray Davies’s plea for “little shops, china cups and virginity”. Read the rest of this entry »
The graphical display of discovery / disclosure information has been one of the most interesting developments in software designed for search of all kinds. It is specifically so for litigation document review purposes and, perhaps even more so, for early case assessments when you are trying to find out just what the scope is of your document universe.
One of the distinguishing features of such a task is that the searcher often has no real idea of what the search will turn up. In most areas of research, you have a broad idea of the parameters of the hunt – I have been looking up flights and hotels recently, for example, and had the advantage of knowing that I was after a particular kind of information (a hotel, say) in a particular place (or places, given the particularly daft schedule which faces me over the next few days). Ranging shots in Google brought me to specialised databases which had fields to search in which corresponded with obvious inputs – dates, room-type, number of nights and so on – which are standard across most such resources.
Litigation is often not like that. You will, of course, have got from your clients some clues – names, date ranges, commonly-used words and so on – but whilst they may narrow the field, they are not conclusive as to what you might turn up, not least because you (if you are a lawyer) are an officer of the court as well as the client’s gladiator, and it is your practising certificate and insurance policy which is on the line. Read the rest of this entry »
Professor Richard Susskind caused a stir at the ABA TechShow in Chicago in April with his thoughts on the way the future looks for the legal profession. The context was the launch of his latest book, The End of Lawyers?, that comforting question mark flagging the possibility that the profession may survive in some form if it adapts.
I wrote about Susskind’s book when parts of it were trailed in the Times (see Richard Susskind and the End of Lawyers) and I will not repeat what I said there about the potential for change in the litigation support market. Nor will I attempt an overview of Susskind’s wider propositions, which are readily available elsewhere.
I have been listening to a webcast of a discussion between Richard Susskind and Mark Harding, Group General Counsel of Barclays, and focusing on a couple of points which seem to me to both imminent as opposed to speculative (although Susskind’s speculations tend to become the norm rather quickly), and relevant to the management of litigation and other areas which involve the handling of electronic documents. Litigation is the one area which (as I noted in my earlier article) has defied Susskind’s original predictions because (he told me when I asked him three years ago) the clients had not put pressure on the lawyers to adopt technology. Read the rest of this entry »
Autonomy has wasted little time in extending its search technology into the iManage products which came to it with the acquisition of Interwoven. It has announced an audio processing capability for what is now called Autonomy iManage WorkSite.
The business rationale lies in the growing amount of audio which law firms now have. Voice-mails, recorded depositions, in-house educational materials, and a wide range of other sources are now routinely recorded and kept. The need to search them is no less than the need to hunt down documents in more conventional forms – and it is a measure of how far we have come that we now consider Word files, spreadsheets and other electronic files as “conventional”. Read the rest of this entry »
Rob’s then e-discovery blog was the first resource I came across when I began to inform myself about US legal and technical e-discovery developments. We have never met, though we must have been simultaneously in the same place at events like LegalTech, but have corresponded over the years.
The resources available from the Unfiltered Orange page include a weekly update e-mail, Twitter and FaceBook. The update covers the Top 25 eDiscovery stories, and if he happens this week to have put one of mine at the top of his list (Distinguishing workplace spying from data collection), that serves merely as a prompt to do something I have been meaning to do for some time, and point you towards his site.
Identifying, culling and filtering the world’s e-discovery stories is similar in many ways to the exercises which they describe – there are a lot of them and not all are worth looking for or looking at. I have the luxury of choosing only those which interest me personally. Rob Robinson’s self-imposed brief is rather wider and I am, as always, grateful for the pointers he gives to the stories which matter.
As you may recall, I was not able to go to a meeting in Toronto at the beginning of April, when Senior Master Whitaker and I had hoped to see Justice Campbell and others to talk about common ground between Canada and the UK on the case management of civil litigation. I am also not going to Montreal next week for the LegalIT 3.0 conference on 20 and 21 April for the prosaic reason that I have only just found out about it.
You are all too young to remember the clichéd ending to those American travel documentaries which always ended with the sun sinking slowly in the West. So am I, despite being old enough to remember telexes and carbon paper as the must-have office equipment. The expression lives on, in the UK at least, because of the Peter Sellers parody “Balham – Gateway to the South”, which itself dates from 1964 – a cliché kept alive by a parody which is itself too old for most to remember.
My photograph was taken on the Queensboro Bridge as we left LegalTech for JFK this year, made possible by the generous windows of the large black limousine which Nigel Murray had commandeered at a good rate with a degree of resource doubtless acquired in his army years. This combination of clichés, parodies, sunsets, New York and LegalTech was brought to mind by a slight sense in some quarters that this Leviathan of a show may have had its day. Read the rest of this entry »
I went to the Legal Technology Awards last night at the kind invitation of Nigel Murray of Trilantic. Nigel disappointingly, turned up in black tie and not the lycra cycling gear which we had hoped to see (read Murray to cycle across the Channel if you find this reference obscure).
Trilantic emerged as Highly Commended in the category Electronic Disclosure Support / Service Provider of the year in this, its third year of being short-listed. The category winners were Merrill Legal Solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Like ice-hockey, e-disclosure requires some equipment and some skills. You don’t need to be a genius, merely competent, and you can delegate the technical skills to others. You are on thin ice if you approach litigation in 2009 without the resources to play the game properly
Those who come and see me here in Oxford generally get taken on a route-march round Port Meadow with the dog. Ideas and thinking seem to come more easily out there than around tables, in conferences or at bars, which are the more conventional venues for discussion.
The Meadow varies with the climate: sometimes it is a green, grassy field, sometimes a dusty prairie, often a large inland sea. Today it is an ice-rink, with people playing ice-hockey on it.
Lawyers in Australia have served a default judgment on borrowers by sending it via Facebook. The Supreme Court of Australian Capital Territory gave leave for service to be effected in this way because the borrowers had left their last-known address. There was enough information on the Facebook accounts to satisfy the court that the addressees were the right people. Read the rest of this entry »
Internet telephony, like litigation technology, is now accessible and affordable. Ignoring VOIP merely passes up the chance to cut your telephone bill. Ignoring litigation technology may cost you rather more. The problems, and the solutions, are the same everywhere
A male who bought his first PC shortly after they first came on the market and who has been a software developer might be regarded with some suspicion when he tries to induce others to use technology. You could look at it the other way, of course, and reckon that if someone imbued with office computer technology since its infancy still finds some of it near-magical in its power, then it might be worth a look.
This was brought to mind by two phone calls I received in close succession across midnight on Saturday. At that time of night it is the middle of the day in West Coast America and early morning in Victoria, Australia. My first call was from Browning Marean of DLA Piper US LLP in San Diego and the second was from Geoffrey Lambert of KordaMentha in Melbourne. Both were by VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and the total of two hours’ crystal-clear conversation with opposite corners of the world cost none of us anything. Read the rest of this entry »
November marks the first anniversary of what became the E-Disclosure Information Project. It did not have that name when I ran a half-day training session for judges in Birmingham last November but it was effectively launched with that event. This Commentary began a year or so earlier.
That first session was made possible by generous support from forensic collections expert FoxData whose Ian Manning has continued to back what I do, by turning out to speak and with useful information and introductions as well as financially. Tyrone Edward, now at Ernst & Young Forensic Technology & Discovery Services, made the suggestion for a business model which has allowed me to spend substantially all my time on spreading information about electronic disclosure. The Project is sponsored by the companies whose logos appear here, but on the basis that it is independent and product-agnostic.
The main outputs from the e-Disclosure Information Project are what I write here and on my website, and conferences. There are 228 posts on this site. None of them are simple regurgitations of press releases – PRs are invaluable sources of hard information, but I am more interested in the context and the implications of a software or services initiative than in the bare words of a press release. Read the rest of this entry »
A career devoted to court rules and electronic documents is not an instant turn-on for dinner party conversation. The subjects are, however, important ones for businesses beyond those which actually work in litigation, and the rate of change is increasing
What exactly is it that you do? Like all of us, I get asked this question from time to time by people who are outside the world of law and technology. It is much easier for those of you who read this. If, whatever your gender, you say you are a litigation solicitor, then doubtless people gaze on you with that same awestruck admiration which was formerly reserved for chaps on leave from the trenches. If you are a supplier and say that you work at the cutting edge of information technology then you are up there with rocket scientists – they do not understand, but they know it matters. Barristers are assumed to have mighty brains and Ciceronian eloquence. If you are a judge, then you are met with equal deference whether you are a part-time Deputy Recorder or sit in the Court of Appeal.
When they ask me, my answer usually elicits a perfectly understandable look of blank incomprehension. “I speak and write about the disclosure of electronic documents for litigation” I say. “Will you excuse me?” they reply. “I’ve got to go and see a man about a dog” or some such transparent excuse to get away. Read the rest of this entry »
The Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, has appointed Lord Justice Jackson to head a committee to review the costs of civil litigation.
The appointment apparently follows a meeting between Sir Anthony Clarke and Bridget Prentice, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice. Bridget Prentice’s specific responsibilities include access to justice (or, rather, Access to Justice, the capitals presumably denoting a Government “initiative” rather than merely a statement of the right of every citizen).
There is as yet nothing on the Ministry of Justice web site about this, but a Legal Week report says that the review will begin in January and report in December 2009. Lord Justice Jackson will be assisted by a small team of assessors drawn from the judiciary, the legal profession and, interestingly, an economist. Read the rest of this entry »
The odds on gaining improved information management from the recession are better than those on offer for Peter Mandelson’s resignation before the next election. The war to tame the information needed for litigation and regulation, like other wars, will breed new tactics and technologies
My article What will recession do for civil justice?, which I published last Friday, brought together subjects as diverse as the agricultural depression of the 1870s and Peter Mandelson’s attachment to rich foreigners, in the context of leadership and the role of judges in the recovery which will come from the attrition of recession. My theme was that as lawyers and judges sort through the wreckage of the old economy, there may be an opportunity for business practices to take a leap forward. Specifically, I suggested that the time and expense of handling the litigation which has suddenly become a non-optional part of corporate strategy might prompt companies to reappraise how they manage the information whose volumes will prove the biggest single source of expense in litigation. The courts will have a hand in shaping how important that seems next time round. Read the rest of this entry »
The Vikings brought with them some habits which were deplored by their hosts, but they also brought technology which we turned to our advantage. We do not much like some of the practices in US civil courts, but we can certainly use the technology which has been honed in them
On 8 June 793, the first Viking long-ships appeared off the coast of Britain – “ravages of heathen men” said the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which had recently predicted some such cataclysm. The Vikings did a bit of raping and pillaging and pushed off home. The next year they were back, but were beaten off, retiring hurt with their leader dead, many drowned in a storm and others killed on landing.
Their technology, particularly in ship-building, was way ahead of its time, and improved rapidly to reflect the experience of the sailors and as an aid to the rough and tumble of their work. Not only were the ships able to face the roughest storms, but they had shallow draughts and were light enough to carry, both useful developments which were enhanced to cope with their raids. Nor were their victims an uncivilised and impoverished race – the visitors would hardly have bothered to keep coming back if they had not hoped to profit from it and, however attractive the ladies of the North-East, their charms hardly warranted a risky annual journey. Read the rest of this entry »
Attenex is not the only provider of heavy-duty processing and analysis software for chewing through very large amounts of electronic data, but the name has become a kind of shorthand for that function. As Hoover is to vacuum cleaners, so Attenex is to massive volumes of data in the e-Discovery world – not a bad analogy, in fact, given the aptitude of both for sucking up lots of stuff. Read the rest of this entry »
It is not often that I devote a whole article merely to the opening remarks of the chairman of a conference, but then it not often that one has a former Lord Chancellor in the chair. Lord Falconer’s speech at the Legal Week Litigation Forum which covered the economic drivers to litigation warranted the space I gave to it. This page covers the session in which I played a part.
I was a panellist in a session called Streamlined litigation: assuring efficiency through applied technology, along with Robert Brown, senior director of First Advantage Litigation Consulting Services and Rachel Coldbreath of Cleary Gottleib Steen & Hamilton LLP. That we never got as far as my prepared notes is by no means a complaint. Quite apart from the fact that I can use them somewhere else, the one hour allotted to us raced by in an unusual amount of audience inter-action. This was explained partly by the fact that this was a litigation audience rather than one narrowly limited to electronic disclosure, and partly by the layout of the room – members of a group facing each other round a square of tables are somehow more inclined to speak out than one in rows of chairs. Read the rest of this entry »
CaseLogistix, Anacomp‘s litigation document review platform, has announced new functionality to handle native documents and other changes. Anacomp are amongst the sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project.
CaseLogistix has always had the ability to handle documents in their native format (150 file types at the last count). The enhancement assigns a unique identifier to each document – as opposed to pages – allowing concept search tools to treat single-page tiff files as a single document.
Other changes include improved management of redacted files, printing of attachments with parent documents and other parent/child enhancements, a combined native/image tab in the document viewer and direct native file ingestion. Read the rest of this entry »
After this February’s LegalTech in New York, I wrote a piece called Why no UK lawyers at LegalTech? in which I suggested that UK law firms – partners and/or their senior IT staff – would benefit enormously from a few days in a place where almost every e-disclosure supplier and expert, including a large contingent of experienced UK litigation support managers, gather every year. There they could see demos of every application worth seeing, talk to pretty well everyone with knowledge and experience – and have a good time as well. Read the rest of this entry »
I am off tomorrow morning to Pasadena, coming back via Dallas where ILTA (the International Litigation Technology Association) is holding its big annual conference.
The draw in Pasadena is Guidance Software who, as I wrote in a recent post, were early sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project which I run, and who have been enthusiastic supporters ever since. This is a welcome opportunity to get to see the senior management, including CEO Victor Limongelli whom I met briefly in London last year.
ILTA is an opportunity to catch up with people with whom I correspond or speak but rarely see. There is an increasing amount of information-trading about developments in electronic discovery between those in the UK and the US, as well as Australia. The problems, and the solutions, are obviously similar. The rules and the practice are perhaps less alike in practical effect than they may appear to be. Superficial impressions of scale are misleading – big cases are big cases in all these jurisdictions, but most US lawyers litigating electronically are in small firms. What is different is the culture in which lawyers, judges, suppliers and clients work towards cost-effective solutions pro rata to all sizes of case, and cultural differences are best identified face to face.
Most of the Project’s sponsors will be there – OutIndex, Guidance Software, LexisNexis, Epiq Systems, Anacomp / CaseLogistix, Autonomy Zantaz and Trilantic – a chance to meet the US people where generally I deal with the UK end, as well as to see others who may become sponsors. As at LegalTech in New York every February, I go with few pre-booked appointments, confident that the days will be filled with discussions which add value to what I do in the UK.
I should be able to write about it all from there, at least as a technical matter. The practice is likely to be otherwise.
If you are at ILTA and would like to know more about the e-Disclosure Information Project, do come and say Hello or send me an e-mail.
Nearly a year after FoxData agreed to be the first sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project, I have at last been to see the company’s premises and met Ian Manning properly
The order in which logos appear beside these pages reflects the sequence in which companies agreed to sponsor the e-Disclosure Information Project. For those new to this site, the Project’s purpose is to increase awareness about electronic disclosure by bringing together all those with an interest in what is often the biggest single expense in civil litigation. Of all the players – courts, practitioners, corporate clients and suppliers – the group which is most remote from the practicalities is the one which has to make the decisions about case management, the judges. Read the rest of this entry »
Before you entrust your clients’ disclosure documents to a litigation support provider, it is worth getting to know a few, and that means real human contact, not just reading up about them. Meetings do not have to involve sitting round a table in an office.
The week in which the EU has purported to abolish the acre is a good time to mention the 450 acre field in which I hold meetings when people come and see me. It is called Port Meadow and lies a couple of minutes from my front door. The most recent such visitor, last week, was Andrew Sieja, CEO of KCura, whose Relativity document review application is making its mark.
More on Relativity in a moment. What is the value to me of meeting CEOs of litigation support providers and software companies? Why do they want to meet me? What is the best context for these getting-to-know-you conversations? And why does it matter in a business which, stripped of its fripperies, comes down to applying some technology to a pile of data so that lawyers can fight about it? Read the rest of this entry »
After leaving Oxford, I
qualified as a solicitor in 1980.
I have worked as a consultant
and developer in litigation support since 1993.
My primary focus is on the encouragement of
e-Disclosure by working with the courts and
with suppliers to achieve a joint approach.
Posted by Chris Dale 
