A lot of what I write suggests to law firms that their clients’ interests and, indeed, their own, may lie in delegating much of their eDiscovery / eDisclosure function to others. I usually link this to Professor Richard Susskind’s observation about how law firms must find ways of working which are quicker, cheaper, more efficient or to a higher quality “using different and new methods of working”.
Outsourcing, in its various guises, must be considered in this context, whether that be by using software which is hosted and managed by someone else or by taking advantage of the many (and competing) managed review services which can often perform this most expensive component of eDiscovery / eDisclosure to a quality and at a cost which few law firms can match.
I am careful always to make it clear that outsourcing is not the answer in every case, but is something which should be considered alongside purely internal solutions. As the UK moves towards costs budgeting and enforced proportionality, the ability to offer alternative ways of giving disclosure becomes more important. You do not need to be driven by the rules of any one jurisdiction to want to be able to offer clients and the court a range of options. Read the rest of this entry »
eDiscovery software provider iCONECT featured in a US television broadcast about the effect of technology advances on business and employment. As Richard Susskind publishes his new book on legal business and well-known shops disappear from the High Street, we have to accept that world is changing. There are opportunities for some.
A CBS broadcast called 60 Minutes recently included a segment on technological advances and their impact on jobs. As its title Are robots hurting job growth? implies, the broadcast was largely about the effect on employment as machines replace humans at work. The program covered some repetitive physical tasks of the kind which largely involve moving things from one place to another, but it covered also the rise of software applications in the financial, medical and legal markets, and used clips of iCONECT users to illustrate how technology has replaced the manual review of paper.
We see machines whizzing round a warehouse and delivering stock to be packed, little trucks touring hospital corridors with meals, medicines and laundry, and machines able to do repetitive tasks in factories. Positive and negative themes compete for attention: the warehouse robots each replace 1.5 employees; on the other hand, equipment like this allows the repatriation of manufacturing from China – Philips has brought the production of electric razors back to the Netherlands, for example.
On the business and professional side, we are shown computers dispensing cash, printing airline boarding passes, and conducting stock market transactions, while IBM’s “Watson” wins the television game show “Jeopardy”. It is easy to see how modern analytical eDiscovery tools like iCONECT’s XERA fit into this context, with a quick glimpse of a pile of cardboard filing boxes to remind us of the recent past. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a summary of the posts about eDiscovery / eDisclosure on my Google Plus page between 21 and 28 October 2012. Those which relate to webinars etc which have now passed may lead to blind links. Where I know of a new address for a downloadable version I have given it.
Hobs Legal Docs was the sponsor of an interesting article in The Lawyer recently which emphasised the need to use technology to respond quickly to regulatory demands.
Those who find themselves overwhelmed by the timetables for eDisclosure / eDiscovery in civil litigation may like to consider the pressures faced by companies and their lawyers when a regulatory investigation turns up. There are no nice long periods for reflection when decisions are to be made not only about the proper scope of the discovery exercise but also about the tactical and strategic implications.
Litigation searches are generally bounded by defined issues, and one can usually identify a date range and a handful of key custodians. Regulatory investigations often have no such boundaries and the question to be answered very quickly is “How deep is this pit?”. That in turn dictates the approach to be taken vis-a-vis the regulator, ranging from aggressive rebuttal to grovelling contrition, often backed (in cartel cases, for example) by a potential hurry to be the first to come clean – the “race for leniency” as one contribuotr puts it in the article.
If the use of technology like predictive coding seems optional in some cases, it is hard to see alternatives for some of these regulatory investigations. There is no time to set junior fee earners to making document trawls and it is vital to put senior lawyers to work at once to “teach the system how to look at documents in the way lawyers do” (as Mark Surguy of Eversheds put it in his Dublin speech last week). A ticking-off from a judge is a mild consequence compared with the effect on the share price and other significant things if one gets this reaction wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
How much work should the clients put into their own eDisclosure / eDiscovery? We express caution at the idea that the clients should collect their own data, largely because of the risk that they will damage its integrity in the process or, at least, lay themselves open to the suggestion that they might have done. On the other hand, it is their case, their facts and their document collection, and it is right to hope for their input into the decisions as to what is important – or, to put it another way, it is rather arrogant for the lawyers to get stuck into a disclosure exercise without getting as much information as they can from the clients.
Laura Zubulake, she of the eponymous sanctions case in the US, is emphatic that her own detailed review and analysis of the documents, relying as it did on her own knowledge of her former employer, was crucial in challenging their discovery and winning her case.
Terry Harrison of Hobs Legal Docstells an interesting story about a case in which the clients had devoted a great deal of time to their own painstaking analysis of the documents required for a case. Hobs first reduced the volume from its original 300Gb of forensically-collected data and brought it down to 40Gb. They then used Relativity Assisted Review (RAR) to help work through the rest, much aided by the work which the clients had done. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
In a previous article, Legal IQ makes a success of their Washington eDiscovery Exchange, I gave the background to Legal IQ’s recent Information Governance and eDiscovery Strategy Exchange, together with a little local colour. The latter, incidentally, is more than mere travelogue. It is perfectly possible to jet into someone else’s country, take part in a panel and jet out again, and sometimes I have to do just that. I prefer to spend a little time there, not kidding myself that I thereby become anything more than a casual visitor, but at least absorbing a little of the culture and feel of the place.
This event packed a lot into two-and-a-bit days. I could not attend every panel, but I got to most of them. What follows is what appeared to me to be the key points from those which I attended. Read the rest of this entry »
Xerox XLS is organising a webinar called Preparing for the Jackson Reforms to take place on Monday 15 October at 4 PM BST. The participants are Senior Master Steven Whitaker, U.K. Royal Courts of Justice, Robert D. Brownstone, Esq., Technology & E-Discovery Counsel and Co-Chair, EIM Practice Group, Fenwick & West LLP and Gabriela P. Baron, Esq., Xerox Litigation Services. I am the moderator.
April 2013 brings a number of significant reforms to the management of litigation in England and Wales. Many of those concern case management, giving effect to Lord Justice Jackson’s comments in his reports about the need for judges to make full use of their powers of active management to ensure that cases proceed in line with the overriding objective.
One of Lord Justice Jackson’s themes was that clients require (and deserve) transparency and predictability of timescales and costs. A big step was taken in this direction with the eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B of 2010 and the Electronic Documents Questionnaire which came with it. That was in hand before Lord Justice Jackson’s report on litigation costs, but was consistent with the same theme of active management and predictability.
The 2013 reforms, amongst other things, extend the obligation to exchange information to a wider range of cases, give the court a clearer power to order disclosure appropriate to the case by replacing the present default of standard disclosure with a “menu option” of orders which might be made, and provide for costs management in the form of budgets to be agreed and / or ordered by the court.
Senior Master Whitaker led the working party which devised the practice direction and is a practical authority on its implementation – “practical” in the sense that he is an active case managing judge. Although the rules obviously apply only in England and Wales, the principles which they set out apply more widely. Robert Brownstone and Gabriela Baron will help us draw wider messages from the proposed new rules which are of importance to judges, lawyers and clients in any jurisdiction which requires discovery of documents.
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 second of five posts about ILTA 2012. In other posts I talk generally about the benefits of going to ILTA’s big conference, about some of the themes which emerged and about the ILTA Peer awards. This one is largely about my own time there.
I arrived on Saturday, partly because the air fares are lower then and partly to play myself in gently. I like watching conferences come to life, venues gradually filling up and empty spaces turning into a stage set with a big cast. The putative UK ILTA virgin to whom this post is directed would similarly appreciate a gentle start to an event which, once under way, proceeds at an unrelenting pace.
I went to only two sessions. One involved eDiscovery/eDisclosure experts from the US, the UK (Vince Neicho from Allen & Overy), Australia and Canada, which set out succinctly the developments in each jurisdiction. I hope to write about this separately.
The other was billed as The ESI debate is on! and was a free-form discussion whose participants were described as “passionate and cantankerous”. That sounded about right, for I was one of them. The others were George Socha and Patrick Oot, moderated by Browning Marean of DLA Piper US. You catch the flavour of it from the fact that the first question was framed as a debating motion, that “US discovery is much better than UK eDisclosure”. I felt it necessary to preface my opposition to this motion by making it clear that, notwithstanding anything I was about to say, I was in favour of most things American except its eDiscovery and its coffee. 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 have updated the list of pending conferences on my web site, adding new ones and correcting dates, venues and URLs of those which have changed.
I have included some which I am not going to – the EDI Leadership Summit and Relativity Fest 2012 were originally ruled out by events which have now dropped off my calendar. I wanted very much to go to both of them, but my mother’s illness (she seems to be recovering, thank you to all those who have asked) argues against adding more events to the calendar whilst she is still in hospital.
First up is ILTA 2012 ac2dc, celebrating its 35th event anniversary next week. The venue is again the vast Gaylord National Resort and Conference Centre outside Washington DC, a place which manages to feel strangely intimate despite its vastness, at least during this most friendly of eDiscovery conferences.
ILTA prides itself on its peer-to-peer support ethos which gives it a different flavour to other conferences. As last year, it provides a mobile app which helps you to navigate the packed program. I am taking part in a session which deliberately has no specific subject – it is called The ESI Debate Is On! (Hashtag #LPSPG6) and its description reads “There has recently been much debate over eDiscovery topics, and this session is sure to touch upon them all! Join our eDiscovery industry leaders as they discuss hot topics that are not without controversy.”
The other panel members are Patrick Oot and George Socha. Browning Marean of DLA Piper is the moderator, so expect variety, unconventionality and, with any luck, something for us all to disagree about.
Although this is the longest conference of the year, it never seems quite long enough to see everybody. For me, it is an opportunity to catch up with those who sponsor the e-Disclosure Information Project, whether by appointment or by bumping into them.
The whole thing is pure pleasure so far as I am concerned, and being there for nearly a week takes some of the sting out of the tiresomeness of the travelling.
I will be writing separately about the other forthcoming conferences over the next few days.
A longer list than usual, partly because many interesting things came along and partly because I was called away for over a week before I had the chance to list them.
A reminder of my recent interview, organised by Recommind and filmed at the top of the Gherkin, with Senior Master Whitaker. Our subject was the acceptability of predictive coding in UK litigation. Master Whitaker knows more about this than any UK judge and is himself responsible for case management of London Queen’s Bench cases at the stage when the question falls to be discussed.
His views are worth hearing, and this is a painless way to receive them.
The latter illustrates the enormous quantity of information which we give away merely by having our mobile phones turned on all the time – thousands of pieces of data which, when added together and, perhaps, aggregated with information from other sources, presents the complete story of our lives, much of it obtained legitimately and with our own consent.
The AccessData product provides the means by which lawyers may get into that information for the purposes of making or rebutting allegations in litigation and for similar purposes. This goes far beyond the implications in criminal proceedings or through the actions of security services. Many a civil case – to do with employer-employee relations, matrimonial disputes, IP theft and just simple cases of disagreement and conflicting evidence in straightforward contract, negligence or accident claims – may be resolved by examination of the mobile phone of a party or a witness.
The German Green politician Malte Spitz clocked up 35,831 rows of information in a spreadsheet about his mobile phone data between August 2009 and February 2010. If you add this to his non-phone data and externally available information, you have a more or less complete picture of his life. The witness who denies knowing someone or who asserts that he or she was or was not in a particular place at a particular time, does not stand a chance when evidence collected from his or her mobile phone shows otherwise.
That is the point of AccessData’s new product.
It is, no doubt, chilling to know that all this information is available. It is equally chilling, to my eye, that so many lawyers simply do not know that information of this kind is both available and fits within the definition of a discoverable / disclosable document by the definition of a document in most common law countries. But if that is bad enough in the context of civil litigation, how much worse is it when no one spots that this information may convict or acquit someone charged with a criminal offence?
Whatever else one might say about the lawyers for the Da Silva Moore plaintiffs, you can’t deny that they are good at volume – yards of words pour out at every opportunity, and while few of them seem to have much bearing on the case (remind me what that was about again?), they must be due for some kind of prize for the sheer mass of words they can get down in a given time.
Have you read their 500 page Objection to Judge Peck’s denial of their recusal Motion? No, nor have I.
K&L Gates (where would be be without their always timely and succinct commentaries?) have put up a link to the Rule 72(A) Objection itself, and told us where to find the declaration in support of it. Let me know if you find anything interesting in it.
I give below links to my recent posts on my Google Plus page. The last few weeks have been a particularly fruitful time in eDiscovery, both in the UK and elsewhere, and I have a stockpile of other articles and links which I hope to add to this collection.
Those of you interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) may like to know that these links, when added to Google’s indexing power over its “own” data, generally perform very well in Google searches. The value of these links, therefore, lies in more than merely pointing you to recent interesting posts; it has a long-term purpose as well.
This is a continuation of a series of posts about the Nuix Information Governance Forum, held in June at Palm Beach in Florida.
Debra Logan of Gartner was the keynote speaker. Her speech was all meat, and the only acceptable way of reporting it is to pick what appear to be to me to be her top 10 points. These were, in no particular order, as follows:
We have gone beyond the ability of most companies even to know what they have got. Storage is not cheap and is only the beginning of the expense. We have to compute these costs, the obvious ones and the less obvious ones, before we can begin to apply for budget for new projects.
We want more information and we want it now, but we cannot make decisions with it. How do you get attention when the detail of information governance is yet more information and when no one can explain information governance to decision-makers in a way which matters to them? We need an impasse-breaker. Read the rest of this entry »
The Times has an entertaining column on Saturdays in which it fields complaints made by its readers about its manner of expression (as distinct from purely factual errors). Not infrequently, the complaints relate to the use of American terms in place of English ones.
This week’s crop includes a complaint, from a High Court judge no less, reported thus:
“Must we behave as though we are American? … ‘Mr Nadir took the witness stand’ could so easily have read ‘Mr Nadir went into the witness box’, and been accurate too.”
The Times accepted the rebuke, as it should. Quite apart from anything else, the original report made it sound as if Asil Nadir had compounded the alleged offences which brought him to court with the additional crime of nicking the fixtures and fittings, calling up a picture of him dragging a heavy piece of furniture along the echoing corridors of the Old Bailey.
There was a double offence here, of course – even if one were to accept that witnesses have stands like cakes and hats do, the verb “take” has thirteen different meanings in my dictionary, none of them a synonym for “went into” or “stood in”. You can take a wallet, a bus, a walk or a shower; you can take offence, a liberty, an oath or a look; you can take in, take off, take up, take away or take out; you can even take a stand – but not a witness stand, not in English, anyway.
American representations of courtrooms in films and on television are probably to blame for this sloppy appropriation into English of foreign-language expressions and foreign customs. Another common one is the pictures of those sweet little mallets which American judges use when they want to attract attention to themselves. I think that the gavel as visual cliché has at last disappeared from UK-facing marketing literature – it took about 20 years for US software marketing departments to realise that our judges rely on a steely eye rather than an auctioneer’s prop to get attention.
The Times has worse Americanisms than that to root out. I recently came across in its pages the adverbial use of “likely”, as in “it will likely rain”, which is as ghastly a misuse of language as one will find anywhere.
If you wonder why I spent Saturday pouring out articles, it is because Saturday was the only day last week which did not involve a plane, a train, a seminar or a recording of some kind. The rest of the eDiscovery / eDisclosure world does not, alas, stand still just because I am on the run, and there is a lot of useful and interesting stuff going on. Apart from eDiscovery, I am interested in liberty of the subject, freedom of speech and marketing in the broader sense of public image, and the UK has given us some splendid examples of cock-ups in each of these areas in the past few days which provide amusement value and object-lessons.
May and June are always busy times anyway. As I write this, I am in the US for the fourth time since the end of April. I have yet to finish writing up the Asia eDiscovery Exchange 2012 in Hong Kong a few days ago. In between, I have been to Leeds for a three-hour CPD seminar and taken part in a London talk with HHJ Simon Brown QC and Nigel Murray of Huron Legal, which I will write about separately.
I am at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida for the Nuix Information Governance Leadership Forum which opened yesterday with a keynote speech from Debra Logan, Distinguished Gartner Analyst which, again, I will write about in due course. The Breakers itself is quite remarkable. Its core is a copy, as opposed to the usual pastiche, of the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi in Genoa, and it shows that monumental scale is not incompatible with restrained good taste. Read the rest of this entry »
Epiq Systems, which provides managed technology services worldwide for lawyers and their clients, has commissioned a report about eDiscovery readiness at companies in the US, France, Germany and the UK. It is important, every so often, to get some metrics behind the anecdotal suggestions that many companies have not given this subject the attention it deserves.
Why does it deserve attention? Litigation is but one of the reasons why companies need to access and produce data and documents in a hurry. Increasingly, the pressure comes from regulators and, more specifically, from the fear that a regulator may appear at any moment and demand information. Reports last year from both the US and the UK suggested that many companies do not know even what they are spending annually on reacting to eDiscovery demands one of one kind or another.
The report commissioned by Epiq looks at various sectors and at different sizes of company within each sector. The results, inevitably, vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from sector to sector, presumably reflecting the perceived risk. Read the rest of this entry »
US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck yesterday denied the Da Silva Moore plaintiffs’ recusal motion in robust terms. The S.D.N.Y. Blog pulls out the best bits from the ruling and provides a link to it.
The opinion is measured, analytical and, to my eyes, unanswerable. Most commentators (that is, all bar one, apparently) viewed the plaintiffs’ tactics with a mixture of bewilderment and contempt. Judge Peck keeps his cool, facing down each allegation in turn, and leaving any objective reader with a clear picture of plaintiffs (or, rather, their lawyers – one wonders what the plaintiffs themselves think of all this) who, disliking the outcome of the course they had agreed to, thought they would have a go at displacing the judge in the hope of finding themselves a more amenable one.
This expensive and extravagant side-show has nothing to do with the merits of predictive coding, nothing to do with the issues in dispute and nothing to do with the “just, speedy and inexpensive” requirements of Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Judge Peck’s important messages about proportionality, about cooperation, and about the duty of parties and the court to find the best way of managing cases, have all been drowned. As I have asked before, can anyone remember what this case is actually about? Read the rest of this entry »
I mentioned a while back that London legal services provider Hobs Legal Docs had taken on Patrick Rowan from Ernst & Young as sales director. The press release is here but, as I often do with press releases, I have waited for the opportunity to speak to Patrick Rowan before writing about the appointment.
Regulatory work in general, and Competition work in particular, requires a degree of urgent attention to the documents in a way which makes most litigation look leisurely. Whether the trigger is a dawn raid or an enquiring letter, a company and its lawyers have very little time to establish what the position is and to make informed decisions about it. Since the Akzo Nobel decision on in-house privilege, the imperative is to involve outside lawyers immediately.
Companies like Hobs are well used to collecting data in a hurry, processing it and getting it quickly under the lawyers’ eyes – it is often a revelation to the lawyers that they can start looking at key documents almost immediately, without waiting for full processing to take place. The technology is the same – see Hobs partner list for the companies whose technology might be used. There are obvious differences – a company facing a regulatory investigation does not have the same options to settle or to choose the issues on which to focus. The lawyers from whom the instructions come are also, it seems, a slightly different breed to commercial litigators, probably as a result of the permanent need to react quickly and decisively. Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote recently about a short podcast about predictive coding which I made with James Moeskops of Millnet. We have now done another one, this time with Dominic Lacey and Jamie Tanner of Eversheds.
The context was provided by an exercise which Millnet did with Eversheds in a Commercial Court matter for which predictive coding was seen as the most practical and cost-effective way of dealing with very large volumes of documents. It was one of the exercises which I wrote about in my article Two predictive coding case studies emphasise time and cost savings. The motivation to use predictive coding software (Equivio Relevance in this case), came, as Dominic Lacey explains, from the very high number of false positives which were returned by keyword searches.
Eversheds is one of the more forward-thinking firms in the use of technology for litigation and for other matters where large document volumes are encountered, and the interview, which I moderated, was a good way of hearing about it from the horse’s mouth.
Short podcasts like this – it runs for only 19 minutes – provide a painless way of absorbing news and information. You can link to the podcast from Millnet’s page about it here. That links also to a transcript of the interview and to Millnet’s own article about the case study.
London-based litigation and document management provider Hobs Legal Docs has made two significant announcements whilst I have been on my travels.
The first was the appointment of Patrick Rowan as Sales Director and as a Board Director of Hobs Legal Docs Ltd. Patrick comes from Ernst & Young whence he brings skills and experience in eDiscovery and eDisclosure as it arises in Competition and Regulatory matters, as well as experience in forensics data analytics. The Hobs press release about Patrick Rowan’s appointment is here.
I have yet to meet up or speak with Patrick since his appointment, as I like to do when appointments are made at this level, and hope to remedy that soon.
The other news from Hobs is that it has been appointed a Relativity Premium Hosting Partner, as you can see from the Hobs press release here and the kCura one here. I was asked at a seminar this week if I would point the delegates to providers of software and services. I gave my usual answer which is that the list of logos of those who support the eDisclosure Information Project is a good place to start, whilst adding in the interests of objectivity that there are other players in the market. Providers like Hobs bring a wide range of choices, together with the consultative skills and experience to help point users towards the right solution for their particular needs.
It is worth reminding you that Hobs has a Manchester office and that all these applications, together with Hobs’ ability to manage paper disclosure in tandem with electronic disclosure, are available from there. I was in Manchester with Terry Harrison of Hobs in January (see eDisclosure seminar in Manchester with Hobs Legal Docs) and hope to be back there, this time on my own, later in the year. My next trip north is to Leeds on 13 June for MBL Seminars, something I will write about separately.
Although I made it clear in my article Scattershot innuendo and muck that I was indifferent to the outcome of the arguments on the merits in Da Silva Moore, that is no excuse for substituting the word “Plaintiffs” for “Defendants” in the heading of an article whose entire purpose was to draw attention to the way in which one party is getting all the airtime in the commentary on the case.
Perhaps I was subconsciously proving my own point. Perhaps the most sensible conclusion is that 4.00am on a Saturday morning is not the best time to think up article headings.
I am not too bothered about being defensive on this, but if I were, I would observe that it has taken until today for a sharp-eyed reader to spot my error. The tenor of the article was clear enough.
Changing the titles of articles is a pain, because they go through into the page names, and correcting them fouls up the SEO and breaks third-party links. It seemed, nevertheless, the right thing to do on this occasion.
I am inevitably interested in the ways in which ideas and information are passed to and by lawyers, since they are my target audience and I live by reaching them by whatever means come to hand. It is unsurprising that a barrister can make a video in which he or she passes on knowledge and skills – they are, after all, practiced in articulate oral expression of facts and arguments. It is good to find one who has actually made use of one form of new media, and then published it on another (his blog).
Those of us who follow Seán Jones QC of 11 Kings Bench Walk on Twitter @seanjones11kbw do so for his dry and self-deprecating humour as much as anything. He is a senior employment barrister, and if I employed anyone or was employed (neither being conditions I aspire to), he is the one I would want on my side if a dispute arose. That I reach such a conclusion entirely on the strength of a few tweets illustrates the power of social media as a marketing tool.
Seán Jones muttered something on Twitter recently about going off to make a video, and we now have the results, Witness Statements 7 Deadly Sins. How promising does this look, we ask ourselves, as we see that the video is of the talking head variety and delivered by a man who describes himself as having “a magnificent set of jowls and a grating nasal tone”. Even if this was a fair self-judgement (it is not), you would soon forget it. Read the rest of this entry »
The next event in which I am involved is ILTA Insight in London on 8 and 9 May. This year it runs over two days and is produced in conjunction with LegalTech, a division of ALM.
I am moderating a panel on predictive coding on 8 May. The panel members are Senior Master Whitaker, Greg Wildisen of Epiq Systems, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy and Browning Marean of DLA Piper US.
The focus of our panel is on the use of predictive coding by lawyers and the likely reaction of the courts, under the heading Litigation and Practice Support. A second session on Day 2 will look more closely at the technical aspects on the Emerging Technologies track.
The event itself has a much wider remit than eDiscovery. Other main topic headings include Efficiency and Strategy, Information Management, Innovation and Strategy, and Service and Process Support. Keynote speeches cover Cyber Crime and the Economic Outlook 2012.
There are still some places for this event. This link takes you to the right place to book one of them.
I wrote recently about the podcasts which IQPC have put on their website as tasters for their Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit which takes place in London between 14 and 16 May.
You may be interested in another one which is available from here without having to complete the registration form.
It is one which I recorded with Professor Dominic Regan with the title Why the Jackson Reforms mean the biggest ever upheaval for litigation. I have already published a transcript of this interview but those who prefer to listen rather than read can now hear this short recording.
Dominic Regan is one of the many well-known speakers at the Summit and his talk is likely to be a major attraction for those who want to know how the practice and procedure of litigation is likely to develop.
A two-day absence in a place where cellular data has yet to penetrate put me behind in the routine task of picking up useful articles and putting links to them on my Google Plus page.
Google’s enthusiasm for rolling out new features seems to have outstripped both its ability to handle the basics and its provision of any form of usable support. I am unable to edit posts at the moment – any attempt to save changes gives the message There was a problem saving your page. Please try again. Trying again yields no better answer.
The sunny uplands of Google’s formal help sections do not appear to admit of the possibility of problems. The alternative is a messy forum in which every user dumps questions and issues. An ordinary Google search may turn up the words you are looking for, but then just puts you at the top of an unsorted, unfiltered list of hundreds of questions, none of which ever seems to be answered. The only way to correct the error is to copy the contents to a new post, correct the error (in my case just a missing apostrophe), save the new one and delete the original.
The more positive side, justifying even this tiresomeness, is that the links from here index well in Google. This week’s G+ posts, excluding those which link back to my own Blog, are:
Jim Shook of EMC takes us back to the stage before discovery. The advanced technology used for dealing reactively with discovery requests has its place at a much earlier stage in the process.
Judge Peck’s opinion in Da silva Moore passes into a kind of limbo pending its review by Federal Judge Carter. The analysis of the present position has been exhaustive and, to some extent, repetitive, and those of us who comment on these things have little more to say until Judge Carter does his stuff. We are waiting, too, for the next step in the Kleen Products case before Judge Nolan. It is a bit like one of those uneasy patches on the French battlefields of the Great War as everyone waited for the whistle signalling the next big push.
It is a good opportunity, perhaps, to look in a more rounded way at the broad class of technology which, whether you call it predictive coding, technology-assisted review, machine learning, or whatever, connotes generally the idea that computers learn from a mixture of rules and previous inputs in order to “predict” what should be done with documents, classes of documents or, perhaps, whole servers full of documents. The technology being developed for this, and for similar functions which have nothing to do with discovery, has many of the same characteristics and objectives as the pure discovery applications. Marketing intelligence, news sites which point you to related articles, shopping sites which suggest alternative purchases and (as Judge Peck noted) anti-virus software, all include elements of this kind of prediction. Read the rest of this entry »
Patrick Oot of the Electronic Discovery Institute and the SEC is interviewed by Jim Vint of Navigant in a podcast which anticipates some of the subjects which will come up at IQPC’s London Summit between 14 and 16 May
The list of speakers for IQPC’s 7th Annual Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit is pretty good bait on its own, even without looking at the agendas for the Pre-Conference Workshops, Day 1 and Day 2. Even if you do not know the names of the individuals (and you will certainly know some of them) the job titles and the company names make it clear that you will be getting ideas and recommendations from the top.
The collision between US discovery requirements and EU privacy and data protection laws is a long-running story of mutual incomprehension on which the formal conflict of laws is merely an overlay. US courts and regulators expect every last document to be produced according to a test of “relevance” which is cast as widely as possible, unconstrained (to European eyes, at least) by any sense of proportionality or necessity, even before you reach privacy, data protection and specific restrictions such as French blocking statutes.
There is a yet deeper layer of mutual antipathy, at some levels at least, between France and the US, derived in part from differing recollections of the country’s respective contributions to the outcome of the Second World War, and to the position taken by France in various subsequent conflicts including their attitude to NATO during the Cold War, the bombing of Libya in 1986 and, most recently, the invasion of Iraq. Given the matters of high diplomatic importance which give rise to this US picture of the French, it is perhaps curious that the American view should find its most eloquent expression in words uttered by Groundskeeper Willie in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons; forced to multitask as a French teacher, he hailed his class with “Bonjour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” The expression caught on, exacerbating the idea that the French may talk a lot but rarely defend their position. This extends, in US eyes, to the enforcement of their Blocking Statute. Read the rest of this entry »
Jack Bond, litigation support specialist at Dewey & LeBoeuf in London is organising a charity Quiz Night on 3 May in support of The Children’s Trust and in memory of his daughter, Sarah.
He is getting together teams in tables of six from people in firms, companies and service providers whose work involves litigation support, eDisclosure, translation and the like. Those booked in already include providers including:
Clearwell
Control Risks
CY4OR
DLR Legal
Epiq
Ernst & Young
First Advantage
FTI
Geotext
Millnet
Transperfect
Unified
If you are not yet familiar with the plaintiffs’ arguments about predictive coding (I use the word “about” in its broadest sense, since much of the argument appears to be about some completely different agenda) in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe & MSL Group, Rob Robinson has helpfully gathered together the formal documents in one place.
In my 7 March article Judge Peck’s Predictive Coding Opinion – Reporting the Reaction, I picked out points made by various of the better-known commentators on the then state of play in the Da Silva Moore Predictive Coding dispute. I ended that article by saying “I can think of two or three commentators, so far silent, whose views will be worth having.” Today brings us the expected article from Herb Roitblat, CTO and Chief Scientist for OrcaTec, one of those whose opinion I had in mind.
My decision to stop reporting every additional layer of comment on Judge Peck’s Da Silva Moore Opinion (see Closing down the Da Silva Moore discussion for now) was made in part because of the diminishing returns we were getting from the focus on this one case, and partly because it was becoming clouded with agendas remote from the technology and from the wider issues addressed by Judge Peck in his Opinion. There is room, however, for some straight up-and-down discussion which might otherwise be crowded out.
An example of this is an article in Metropolitan Corporate Counsel headed Can Technology-Assisted Review Coexist with Strategic Search? This is an interview with Amanda Jones, Senior Research Consultant with Xerox Litigation Services. As its heading implies, the article reminds us that the high-end search tools known variously as predictive coding, technology assisted review et al, is but one of the search tools which are available to help with the identification of the documents which matter and the relegation of those which matter less or which do not matter at all. Read the rest of this entry »
One does not have to be obsessive about web rankings to be interested in the reach of one’s blog posts, particularly in an industry which constantly evolves – or, as recently, takes the occasional big jump. Can one be heard beyond one’s regular readers, in an area of business in which everyone has something to shout about?
Idle curiosity made me do a search yesterday morning on Google.com for judge peck da silva moore. I was pleased to see that an article of mine – published less than 24 hours previously and in competition with many US articles – appeared on the first page of search results. A search for peck predictive coding, again in Google.com, had my article at the top.
A post by Millnet’sCharles Holloway (or, strictly, the home page of Millnet’s blog) also appeared on the first page of the first of those searches. Amongst the things Charles and I have in common (being English solicitors with an interest in US eDiscovery is a prerequisite for what I am talking about) is our use of WordPress as our blogging platform. I chose WordPress originally (this was in 2006) because tests showed that it had better SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) than Google’s own blogging platform. Read the rest of this entry »
I am not going to try and compete with the Clearwell / Symantec writing team as it comments on developments in the Da Silva Moore v Publicis Groupe case, the first one in which the use of predictive coding, the most exciting eDiscovery technology development of our time (I speak generically here, not of any one product) is debated in front of one of the few judges who understands it and the contribution it can make to cost-effective eDiscovery.
I am, anyway, too busy banging my head against the desk after reading the Declaration of the plaintiff’s expert witness in support of their objection. How have we come to this? I give no view on the propriety of the Objection or on the content of the Declaration. I am just wondering what it has all got to do with the “just, speedy and inexpensive” requirement of Rule 1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, with proportionality, with the obligation of cooperation imposed by the rules and expressly required by the judge, and with the evidence on which this case will turn.
Applied Discovery has a double interest in the Da Silva Moore v Publicis Groupe case which came before Judge Peck just before Valentines Day. As a software provider, it offers technology-assisted review (which it calls “predictive tagging”) powered by Equivio->Relevance as part of its Leverage Suite – the press release from last August is here. Applied Discovery is also one of the best commentators on eDiscovery practice and the developments which matter to its clients, with weekly updates and good original content.
Both of these interests come together in an article called Did Judge Peck Send Us an Early Valentine? by Applied Discovery’s Ignatius Grande, which picks out points of interest from the published transcript of the Da Silva Moore eDiscovery hearing. It would be fair to say that many of the essential characteristics of a Valentine’s Card are missing – the words “Stop whining and stop the sandbagging. This goes for both sides. Get along.”, whilst definitely about relationships, are not what you would hope to find on the doormat on 14 February.
Ignatius Grande rightly picks out the strands of wider significance: it is important to hear a judge say on the record that technology-assisted review “certainly works better than most of the alternatives, if not all of the alternatives”; lawyers also need a reminder that the goal is not perfection but making the process “significantly better than the alternative without nearly as much cost”; the emphasis on the human input – technology assisted review “is only as good as the training that it gets”, and on the obligation to cooperate, are also important. Read the rest of this entry »
The good-looking, self-confident male never does well in a Losey film. Don Giovanni is hurled down into Hell as Donna Anna has her revenge. Who can forget the handsome face of William (Michael York) as his girlfriend’s (another Anna as it happens) pointed heel stabs down into his face as she escapes from the smashed car in Accident. James Fox in The Servant, Alan Bates in The Go-Between – no, the men do not come out well in a Losey film, and the better-looking they are, the further they fall.
Sorry? Excuse me a moment. Oh, I see. Wrong Losey. They told me to knock out a few words about how the male character is beaten by the female lead in the latest Losey film, and I naturally assumed that they meant Joseph Losey. That image of the elegant heel in the bloodied face seemed just right. I saw Accident shortly after it came out in 1967 and it sticks in the mind somewhat. If I had stopped to think, I would have realised that it was unlikely that a man born in 1909 was still directing films anyway.
Back to the beginning. The good-looking, self-confident male never does well in a Losey film. From the moment the cameras roll in the the latest Ralph Losey thriller, it is clear that the arrogance of the male character will be defeated by the cool self-asurance of the female lawyer who is pitted against him as they argue about preservation and search efforts. Its title, Animation Showing How Not to Cooperate in an eDiscovery Conference may lack the snappiness of the other Losey’s film names, but you can’t have everything.
The male lawyers’ reiterated line “Take it or leave it” makes the lady (she’s bound to be called Anna as well) angry. She doesn’t settle for trivial revenge like Hell fires or stamping on his face – she is off to the judge.
Full marks to Ralph Losey for his latest animated way of making eDiscovery accessible.
For several years now, Nigel Murray, MD of Huron Legal in London, has organised what used to be called the British Brunch, now the Commonwealth Brunch. For many of us, it marks the opening of LegalTech.
What marks it out from the many other events taking place here is that it is non-partisan, and attended by a mixture of people from software and services providers, law firms and others for whom a Commonwealth origin, residence or place of business is the qualification for being there. It is also an event at which wives and children are welcome, and my wife Mary Ann and son Charlie came along too.
The photographs below if you the general idea, as well as showing (at least for those who know the people) that there is a strong UK contingent here again.
It feels, perhaps, like the final relaxation before we move forward to the trenches for tomorrow’s three-day battle. The Hilton here on 6th Avenue is quickly filling up with familiar faces. Many thanks, as always, to Nigel Murray and Laura Kelly for organising this much appreciated annual event.
It is a particular pleasure to welcome London-based eDiscovery / eDisclosure provider Millnet as a sponsor of the eDisclosure Information Project. It is a company with which I have long-standing links and which has turned up in these pages from time to time, most significantly and recently for its involvement in one of the exercises which were the subject of my article Two predictive coding case studies emphasise time and cost savings.
Millnet has been around for more than 16 years. It began as a financial printing company, a business which continues to thrive along with reprographics and digital print. The litigation support function is led by James Moeskops whose past includes a stint dealing with graduate recruitment at one of the Big Four, so it is perhaps not surprising that he has a good eye for identifying the right people to support Millnet’s clients and to grow the business. I wrote recently about Charles Holloway, former litigation partner of whom I said:
Charles is a former litigation partner at a well-known firm of solicitors, and brings much needed legal gravitas (leavened, I should add, with much wit) to a market which risks missing its target through over-emphasis on the alleged magic of technology. The UK eDisclosure industry (and it is no different in the US and elsewhere) very much needs lawyers in it to act as a buffer between those who face the problems caused by technology and those offering the solutions. The Millnet blog, Smart eDiscovery [which Charles writes], is a regular and much-needed part of that translating mechanism.
That legal weight has just been supplemented by the appointment of John Lapraik, formerly a partner at Kennedys with responsibility for eDisclosure issues. John will provide eDisclosure and project management advice to clients as well is responsibility for Millnet’s internal processes. The addition of someone with relevant experience within a law firm is a sound move. Read the rest of this entry »
I have yet to do the necessary cross-linking between the various places in which I put eDiscovery information. At the moment, it makes more sense to push the stuff out there and worry in due course about making a cohesive whole out of it.
Various things come together here. One is that LegalTech New York starts on 30 January. Many providers of eDiscovery software and services make announcements before or at LegalTech, and any ambition to capture them all is doomed to failure unless one is content with a copy/paste approach and has nothing else to do.
I am doing two sessions of my own there (one on information governance with Nuix and a double session on cross-border eDiscovery with Huron Legal). There is the usual problem of trying to make sure that I meet up with as wide a range of people as possible, in circumstances where pre-booking them all (as they sensibly would like for the sake of their own diaries) necessarily limits the number of engagements which I can fit into a day and cuts me out of the ad hoc meetings which you get by just being around (you are not “around” if you are shut up in meeting rooms for three days). Read the rest of this entry »
On 26 March, Lord Justice Jackson will give the SCL Annual Lecture 2012 with the title “Reforming the Civil Justice System“. The venue is the offices of Allen & Overy at One Bishops Square, London E1 6AD, and the event starts at 6:30pm.
I will, unfortunately, not be there – I have tried to work out if I can get back from Brussels in time to attend, but it can’t be done.
I noticed at the end of last year that Applied Discovery’s avatar on Twitter had changed, the big red ball of its LexisNexis owner being replaced by a parallelogram with an @ symbol in it. The same symbol appeared at the top of Applied Discovery’s Weekly eDiscovery Snapshot published on Friday. I filed that unread because I was in the middle of a run of conference calls, and so missed the significant announcement which modestly appeared below the commentary by Jon Resnick, who featured recently in these pages as eDiscovery’s equivalent of Stakhanov.
During my first call, I noticed that Twitter had become unusually active. When I looked at it in between calls I learnt that LexisNexis had sold Applied Discovery to Siris Capital Group. It takes a certain amount of style to tuck an announcement like that at the end of what appeared to be a routine summary of eDisclosure developments.
I dashed off a quick congratulatory e-mail to Jon Resnick and by the time my next call had ended, there was further news – Ramana Venkata, who founded Stratify in 1999 is to be the CEO of the newly independent Applied Discovery.
I have arranged to speak to Jon Resnick next week, something which was on my list anyway – last summer’s integration of Equivio Relevance into Applied Discovery’s Leverage suite has been running long enough for a status update. More on this in due course.
IQPC has a three-day conference aimed specifically at the energy industry and those who advise it. Its strong list of speakers include three judges – Senior Master Whitaker from England and Wales, US Magistrate Judge Frank Maas from New York and Judge Dory Reiling, Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court. Other speakers come from major corporations from Europe and elsewhere, many of whom I have heard speak at other conferences. The web site is here and the agenda here.
There are workshops on 17 January and the conference itself is on 18 and 19 January. These conferences used to illustrate the divide between those responsible for information management within organisations and those involved in the obligations to disclose relevant information for litigation or regulatory purposes. That distinction is becoming blurred, at conferences as in real life, as information management is increasingly seen as a continuum in which discovery is built into the specification, not merely a contingency at the end.
My own panel is called Information Governance for Lawyers: is digital overload now the greatest risk management challenge facing in-house legal departments? The other panellists are Paul Salazar, senior counsel of Siemens AG and Patrick Wilkins, editor of European GC. The judicial panel is on day two. One of its published bullet points refers to the increasing expectation by the courts that companies will have an efficient and effective information management system. This is the corollary, perhaps, of the court users’ expectations that judges will handle their cases efficiently and effectively. If judges are responsible for managing cases then they have the right, and indeed the duty, to take into account the parties’ own ability to manage their information properly.
When you add these subjects to the hard-earned experience of those speakers who deal with information management issues in major corporations, the program adds up to an interesting and useful way to start the year.
You can skip the words and go straight to the pictures. Click on 2011 – A Year in pictures by Chris Dale for the Google+ display
I begin to think that I will not be able to sort out my photographs until I retire, not least because I have years’ worth which must be scanned from film. If digital photography makes the results easier to manage, it also encourages the taking of many more than one did in the days when every click cost money. My hobby is therefore like my professional subject, the management of electronic documents – the means of production has become so easy that we need effective governance policies to control it.
I took nearly 2300 photographs in 2011 or, rather, that is the quantity which survives my first-pass cull. They are big RAW files, 52 GB in overall volume, posing a data archiving issue of their own. They are the one inanimate thing which I would mourn if the house caught fire, and Google Docs is becoming my backup of last resort – a long-term exercise this, since Virgin Media’s upload speed is nearly as poor as its customer service.
The big improvement of 2011 is the photograph-sharing tools within Google Plus – not the only benefit of that significant new player in the business and personal cloud. The process which I adopt (and there has to be a process, of course) has multiple stages, some of them automated. The Google+ collection is read from Google’s Picasa, giving the user a choice between a Picasa slide show and the Google+ endless roll. The latter has the significant advantage that you can scan down the collection very quickly in place of the linear review imposed by the slideshow format.
I am, of course, very lucky in the destinations to which my work takes me, quite apart from the good fortune of living on the edge of Port Meadow in Oxford and in having a mother who lives in one of the most beautiful parts of Suffolk.
This year’s collection is, as usual, a mixture of work and play – conference photographs mixed chronologically with ones taken for pleasure. The first few cover New York, Oxford, Suffolk, Macau, Hong Kong and Frankfurt. Our children make a couple of appearances, at a gig and at graduation ceremonies. Those who work in international eDiscovery will recognise some of the judges and others seen on platforms or holding microphones. Some of these scenes are of the productions of my judicial play in New York and London which, as I said in my more formal review of the year, were my personal high-points of the conference year. Read the rest of this entry »
Ever keen to be up with the trends, I seize on the alleged imminent death of e-mail as one excuse for not sending Christmas messages this year. Other excuses include the deficiencies of Outlook as a mailer (“there is a limit to the addressees per e-mail, but we can’t tell you what it is”), and the latest technology innovation, Apple’s iCloud, whose question about merging address data actually means “do you want to overwrite your large address book with the empty iCloud backup?”. No, I don’t understand it, either, nor do I understand why my remedial steps have given me every entry three times with no clue as to which is the truly replicable one. In any event, I can reach pretty well everyone I want to reach through my blog and Twitter.
What follows is a mixture – summary of what I have been doing, a reminder of some of the blog posts of 2011, the pick of the conferences, and a little about next year’s plans. If the effect is of an extended travelogue, then that reflects the world-wide interest in eDisclosure / eDiscovery which supports Gartner’s estimate, made in May, that the eDiscovery software market will grow and that non-US jurisdictions will account for an increasing percentage of that growth.
Some statistics
I wrote 216 blog posts in 2011 plus shorter ones on a new Google Plus page of which I will say more below. With a few days to go to the end of the year, I have had just over 68,000 page views, an average of 192 page views per day including weekends and holidays. The total number of blog posts is now 968 and they have between them attracted 228,680 views in what remains a niche market. I have over 1,000 Twitter followers and my tweet total stands at over 6,700 including many retweets of industry news created by others.
I spoke at seventeen public conferences in addition to private events, webinars and videos. I travelled nearly 90,000 miles, visiting the US (five times), Germany (four times), Singapore (twice), Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland and France, in addition to events in England. 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 
