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  Attacking eDiscovery Ignorance in 2013

  by Mikki Tomlinson

  The approach of the New Year has me reflecting on the “2012 eDiscovery year in review.”   Where has the industry matured?  How has technology advanced?  What future growth is expected?  The one question that keeps nagging at me is:  In what area does the industry need growth, yet is failing to advance at a respectable pace? The first thing that came to my mind was cooperation. I have written on this topic several times.  Ironically, progress in the area of cooperation was the topic of a blog I wrote in December 2011. In February of this year I wrote a blog titled The Great Cooperation Debate. In this blog, I pondered factors that contribute to the lack of and/or poor cooperation efforts in eDiscovery.  I surmised then, and still do now, that it oftentimes boils down to eDiscovery ignorance.  Thus, [...]

  
  
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  What’s In A Name? eDiscovery Platform Or Not?

  by Barry Murphy

  Sometimes the same story can play out over and over again, albeit with slightly different twists. As a Forrester Research analyst in 2005, I co-authored a report titled “The Enterprise Content Management Dilemma: Point Solution Or Suite.” The premise was simple: a content management platform that could manage all information for all purposes (persuasive for marketing and sales, knowledge for employee use, records retention for compliance and risk) made more sense in theory than multiple applications to manage all that information.

  
  
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  PREDICTIVE CODING METRICS ARE FOR WEENIES PART IV

  by Karl Schieneman

  I have been writing a series of posts about the “ever-elusive” metrics that many eDiscovery professionals seem to be waiting for when it comes to driving mainstream adoption of TAR.  Does the elusive challenge of finding and providing these TAR metrics mean we are doomed not to be able to use TAR?  No, it means clearly that lawyers, who have that rare blend of statistical training and court room experience, have a huge advantage in arguing in discovery disputes.  The fact is there are boatloads of metrics that a smart litigator can use to defend their process.   One analogous observation is the joke people have about statisticians. That two statisticians can argue forever that they are right on opposite sides of many issues by using statistics.   We are going to have these arguments given the fact that the richness of [...]

  
  
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  A Summary of the EDI Summit

  by Peter Pepiton

  It’s getting hard to tell one eDiscovery conference from another, which is a big reason why several of the unique features of last month’s EDI Summit made it such a pleasure to be there.  Formally titled the EDI Leadership Summit, it ran from Oct. 17-19 (that’s in 2012 in case you’re reading this as a result of some Bing search in 2018) in Ft. Lauderdale. EDI is the Electronic Discovery Institute and is the brainchild of Anne Kershaw, Patrick Oot and Herb Roitblat. Its self-description reads: “The Electronic Discovery Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to resolving electronic discovery challenges by conducting studies of litigation processes that incorporate modern technologies.”  www.ediscoveryinstitute.org/aboutus Informally, I would say that they are in the “But what does the data say?” business of bringing some rigor to understanding many of the complexities surrounding eDiscovery [...]

  
  
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  Happy Thanksgiving from the eDJ Group

  by Jason Velasco

  It’s hard to believe the year is almost over.  We at the eDJ Group are very thankful for the wonderful year to date and look forward to an amazing 2013. We have truly built an eDiscovery Dream Team at eDJ and I couldn’t be prouder of the work we’ve accomplished during our first full year. The eDJ Group came together last year with a plan to revolutionize the way analysts approach this complex eDiscovery marketplace.  We have spent the year messaging our transition from simply being just the “eDiscoveryJournal” to a full-fledged analyst firm generating some amazing content.  The team has been hard at work this past week putting together the Q4-2012 market summary which is going to include eDiscovery service providers along with the technology providers for the first time.  Stay tuned for more on that report in the first week [...]

  
  
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  Recap: Managing Complex ESI Projects: Project Management or Crisis Management Panel at Thomson eDiscovery and Legal Technology in Practice Conference 2012

  by Babs Deacon

  In case you were still recovering from Frankenstorm, also known as Sandy, and missed last week’s Thomson event in “can’t-keep-us-down” town Manhattan, the PM panel I was lucky enough to moderate, offered some pithy, real world insights. The panel members reflected the most common big-case partnership of eDiscovery: service provider, represented by First Advantage Litigation Consulting’s General Counsel, Michael Flanagan, and law firm, represented by Bingham McCutchen’s, Director of Legal Technology, Peggy Stulberg.  As a member of a panel earlier in the conference reflected, cooperation isn’t just for litigants, it’s just as important for the client-service provider relationship. Let’s get to the take-aways: Law firms and law departments are beginning to deploy eDiscovery project management.  Corporate PMs are able to standardize discovery processes across the organization and across outside counsel methods.  Very importantly, classic PM is the perfect skill-set for [...]

  
  
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  Not Your Grandfather’s Restoration

  by Greg Buckles

  Best practice or not, many companies rely on disaster recovery systems for business retention and discovery compliance needs. I have written several times about how this can impact your accessibility strategy and discovery obligations, but I wanted to take a look at how the restoration market has evolved as eDiscovery has matured. Historically, litigants have made successful undue burden arguments against mass tape restorations on the basis that the content would be mostly duplicitous or not relevant to the key facts under dispute. The trend to migrate files from unstructured network shares or desktops to SharePoint or other Cloud repositories means that many corporations are finally cleaning up their digital landfills. This can have the unintended consequence of actually making those yearly snapshots or tape collections the only source of unique ESI. So when you find yourself in the unintended [...]

  
  
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  Cloud Providers and the Fog of War

  by Greg Buckles

  Migration to the Cloud is one of the key trends that eDJ Group is calling out for 2013. Almost every major corporate and law firm eDJ client in 2012 either already has data in Cloud services or is exploring the options. As CTO of the eDJ Group, I finally retired my Exchange box and put the eDJ Group on MS Office 365 last year. The potential savings are undeniable, but what happens when your legal department is under the gun to collect from these sources and they go offline? Every one of those Cloud providers will talk about 99.9% uptime guarantees and most will deliver. At the recent Masters Conference, my friend, who also happened to be keynote, Google’s Jack Halprin, pointed out that eight hours of downtime in a year is really just a drop in the bucket. He [...]

  
  

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