« February 2009 | Main | April 2009 »
Dwight Cook of audio production company SoundWorks has an interesting blog post up about audio evidence restoration. He says restoration is more than running the audio through an equalizer and can strip out unwanted noise like construction to restore conversations to a trial-ready format. Read more here.
Attorney and author Michael Arkfeld's new monthly eDiscovery and Evidence Review journal will provide analysis and interpretation of recent case law and rules on EDD. The online legal journal is published by Law Partner Publishing and distributed via PDF and links to most of the cases covered and some court pleadings and other documents. Full release here.
Daticon EED has partnered with eMag Solutions to reduce the cost of and risk of EDD for companies that work on reviews for international cases. The partnership uses eMag's U.K.-based office to combine eMag's EDD and data management with Daticon EED's Discovery Partner hosted e-discovery platform. Full release here.
Self-help e-discovery is so easy, so tempting. It can be so simple to find out an ex-employee or spouse's user name and password for their online account. We suspect they have email in their personal account that they have not produced, that they are hiding in violation of the law. Just a few minutes in their account could give you the evidence you need to prove they are lying. All you have to do is access their online account and look. You could win the case, be a hero!
Winston & Strawn's David Hickey and Veronica Harris offer this analysis of the pending California legislation (Assemby Bill 5) that would address admission of inaccessible ESI.
"Generally, California's proposed e-discovery rules parallel the federal amendments. Both broadly define "electronically stored information." Both require the parties to meet and confer regarding discovery of ESI, 21 days prior to a Rule 16(b) scheduling conference or order under the federal rules and 45 days prior to the case management conference regarding discovery in California state court."
From Law.com's Legal Technology site.
Ralph Losey here to report on an important new opinion by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of an employee whose employer read her personal AOL email account. Van Alstyne v. Electronic Scriptorium, _F.3d_, 2009 WL 692512 (4th Cir. March 18, 2009). The case concerns self-help e-discovery. A boss accused of sexual harassment hacked into the accuser's AOL account in search of good email to use against her. He may have also done it for kicks. Read my latest blog and judge for yourself. Aside from some interesting facts, this case raises important issues on email privacy and attorney ethics. It looks like the tide is beginning to turn in favor of individual privacy rights.
Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Twitter ... (must I go on?) have taken the world by storm. At the present time, Facebook and MySpace alone are currently attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.
Can social networking sites help (or hurt) your case?
As we have seen on MySpace and Facebook, millions of users daily chronicle the intimate details of their lives including posts of their current relationship status, feelings, opinions. Many even include photographs and videos documenting their lives. Even the professional networking site Linked In, is now trying to become more social by adding a blog application. Most users often don’t consider the evidence they are creating.
Continue reading "Social Networking and its Effects on eDiscovery" »
In a short article featured on Friday's Law.com, the authors posed the question, "As work force cutbacks become commonplace, many organizations face the daunting task of locating, securing and imaging hard drives left behind by departing employees. For example, what should a corporation do with 30, 100 or even 1,000 idle computer terminals?" It's a great question. Unfortunately, the article ventured no answer.
Indeed, there's no pat response; but scant resources aren't a free pass to spoliation. Reductions-in-force are Alzheimer's to institutional memory. Suddenly, the people who know where responsive ESI lives and the ones caching stuff for litigation hold are gone. All that remains are their machines, file shares and a hundred little packages of ketchup.
In-house and outside counsel must know how to react molto pronto. So, I thought I'd throw out one low cost approach in hopes that readers might comment and suggest other methods tailored to companies in crisis.
Law Partner Publishing announces the release of the new ARKFELD'S eDISCOVERY and EVIDENCE REVIEW by the well-known author, speaker and attorney, Michael R. Arkfeld. The monthly journal provides monographs as well as unbiased analysis and interpretation of recent case law and rules. THE REVIEW is a legal journal distributed online in a PDF format with links to most of the full text of the cases covered, as well as electronic files of select court pleadings and other documents.
Introductory Offer: Law Partner Publishing announces a 20% promotional discount for a year's subscription to the eDISCOVERY and EVIDENCE REVIEW or the first 20 customers to order the newsletter may choose to receive a complimentary set of Arkfeld on Electronic Discovery and Evidence Publications* ($245.00 value). For further information click here!
The New York Times technology columnist David Pogue just posted an eye-opening interview about data rot -- the propensity for older formats to deteriorate or obsolesce with dire consequences ("Daddy, why aren't there any pictures of me when I was little?").
In my forensics work, I have to preserve terabytes of data for years and years. Lawyer habits die hard, so it's likely my digital archives will someday be my heirs' problems. I've found that I can't rely on one physical medium to preserve data, especially on a drive that's not powered up now-and-then. A drive on the shelf dies faster than one that spins periodically. Digital atrophy.
So, when you think digital storage, think binary; that is, two archival copies on different media, stored so as to be subject to different risks of destruction or deterioration.
Law.com's tech editor Sean Doherty reviews Informative Graphics Corp.'s Redact-It Desktop.
Law Partner Publishing announces the release of the new "Arkfeld’s eDiscovery and Evidence Review" by the well-known author, speaker and attorney, Michael R. Arkfeld. The monthly journal provides monographs as well as unbiased analysis and interpretation of recent case law and rules. The Review is a legal journal distributed online in a PDF format with links to most of the full text of the cases covered, as well as electronic files of select court pleadings and other documents.
The Review:
Continue reading "Arkfeld's eDiscovery and Evidence Review" »
A new case out of Manhattan makes clear with the following words that all lawyers in New York who do discovery had better improve their game:
"This Opinion should serve as a wake-up call to the Bar in this District about the need for careful thought, quality control, testing, and cooperation with opposing counsel in designing search terms or “keywords” to be used to produce emails or other electronically stored information (“ESI”). While this message has appeared in several cases from outside this Circuit, it appears that the message has not reached many members of our Bar."
William A. Gross. Constr. Assocs., Inc. v. Am. Mfrs. Mut. Ins. Co., 2009 WL 724954 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 19, 2009). Download GROSS CONSTRUCTION-EDisc The opinion cites to Judges Grimm and Facciolla and their prior decisions on the need for expertise in search. This is a welcome message to attorneys like me who make their living studying and inventing ESI search methodologies. The efforts of the lawyers in this case were laughable, and once again show the need for both search expertise and cooperation. Read on for the excellent concluding paragraph by Judge Andrew Peck:
Alexander Gallo Holdings has acquired Verdict Systems' Sanction Solutions. The company says the expansion broadens the company's national reach and adds EDD and computer forensics services through sibling company Esquire Litigation. Alexander Gallo Holdings trial consultants will be managed under the Sanction Solutions brand. Full release here.
As I was leaving my son’s preschool this morning, I ran into the father of one of his classmates. The father is a successful software developer who has just released new software for the fishing industry which is a ~$4 Billion industry here in the United States. His software automatically tracks shipments of fish by measurements and pounds and is the first of its kind in the industry. It does all the great stuff software should do in this advanced technology age.
As our discussion progressed and my curiosity increased, I asked him how the users performed their functions before his technology was available to the marketplace. The answer was that it was all performed manually by hand through faxes and phone calls. His software has turned this industry upside down and is performing the work that it used to take many employees to perform. Plus, his software has up-to-the minute tracking through Satellites with guaranteed accuracy.
As I left, my first thought was, “What about the General Counsel’s within the fishing industry. Do they recognize with this new software, that even though the employee’s jobs within the business lines are easier, they have now entered the world of large volumes of eDiscovery due to the new databases the software creates?” Gone are the days of paper and scanning. Plus gone are the days of data ever being destroyed. The massive amounts of data this system creates will continue to grow exponentially just like we have seen in other industries.
Continue reading "Welcome Another Industry’s GCs into the EDD World" »
Check out my latest rant on the hot new case of the month, Bray & Gillespie Mgmt. LLC v. Lexington Ins. Co., 2009 WL 546429 (M.D. Fla. Mar. 4, 2009).
Here one of the biggest law firms in the world, and two of its attorneys, are personally sanctioned for a series of blunders and unnecessary fights over metadata.
Tell upper management about this one. Law firms need to get their houses in order and stop pretending like documents are paper. As Judge Scheindlin says in this same blog, Judge Shira Scheindlin and I Speak on e-Discovery and Education:
"We used to say there’s e-discovery as if it was a subset of all discovery. But now there’s no other discovery."
There is another funny article written on this same case by Wendy Akbar, which I call the Story of the Poor Bunny. Congratulations Wendy on a good blog. Come guest-write for me sometime.
Wave University has announced two upcoming webinars:
IConect Development has partnered with Precision Discovery to offer Precision customers iConectnXT's web-based hosting and review software on top of Precision's EDD software. Full release here.
Mimosa Systems reports that it has upgraded its Mimosa NearPoint email archiving software to include complete content archiving, data protection, and e-discovery support for Microsoft Corp. SharePoint Server 2007.
The upgrade improves recovery service levels, adding the ability to recover from individual items up to complete sites. Full release here.
Since the Zubulake opinions, statistical sampling has taken a slow rise to fame and is just recently getting its due respect due to its measurability and defensibility. Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003) set an early precedent of using statistical sampling of backup tapes to determine whether they might hold relevant e-mail messages that would justify their wider restoration.
I recognize that statistical sampling may be unfamiliar territory to many attorneys and their staff, but with a little research you will see that the statistical sampling method of proof has received universal acceptance in quality assurance testing in both manufacturing and most government agencies. Even in man’s earliest history, we have seen the use of statistical tools in many different industries.
There are scads of famously data-savvy folks in the State of Washington, right? I mean, Bill Gates is there, and Jeff Bezos and John Jessen! Smart, smart folks.
But all that drizzly weather apparently got water on the brains of counsel and the experts in State v. Dingman, 2009 WL 597208 (Wash. App. Mar. 10, 2009), leading to the reversal of a conviction for a promoter who apparently fleeced a lot of folks seeking sunrooms. The State was stubborn. The defense was clueless. And both sides apparently got smacked with the stupid stick. I shake my head in wonderment and despair at an unconscionable waste of scarce judicial resources, especially because this one should have been so easy to work out.
The moral of the story: As long as all the ones and zeros are present and in the right order, the format of a drive image doesn't much matter--at least not in the hands of someone who knows what the heck they're doing.
Searching a large body of anything, be it case law or data in response to litigation, requires not only good search tools but a good process to find what is relevant and discard what is not. In regard to searching case law, we know a key skill for lawyers is finding and analogizing cases in legal argumentation. Dr. Adam Wyner discusses the application of natural language processing tools to online bodies of case law for quicker, more cost-effective delivery of accurate analytic search results. And in regard to searching data in response to litigation, TREC 2008 results are out and the tasks for 2009 are in.
Technical Sales Assocs., Inc. v. Ohio Star Forge Co., Nos. 07-11745, 08-13365 (E.D. Mich. Mar. 19, 2009)
In this case arising from a dispute over sales commissions, the court denied Defendant Ohio Star Forge Company’s (“OSF’s”) motions for contempt and sanctions and granted plaintiff, Technical Sales Associates, Inc.’s (“TSA”), motion for sanctions for destruction of electronic evidence. The court concluded that OSF deleted approximately 70,000 files and moved several email folders to the recycling bin despite a duty to preserve relevant evidence. Read the entire post at ediscoverylaw.com.
Jones Dykstra & Associates has launched v. 1 of its EDD Dictionary, here.
Hat tip to Law.com's Sean Doherty.
Document Technologies Inc. reports that it recently hosted a 40-attorney litigation document review project for The Dine Group at its regional technology center in Washington, D.C. The center provides infrastructure (computers, monitors, furniture, and web connectivity) to support large reviews on short notice. Full release here.
Judge Shira Scheindlin and me, Ralph Losey, will be doing a Webinar on e-Discovery Education at 1:00 pm EST tomorrow, March 18. It is dial in only at 724-444-7444; the Show ID is 37210. The interview webinar will then be available for download for many months to come. It is all free of course. Learn about our backgrounds, educational efforts in academia and elsewhere, her new text book, Electronic Discovery and Digital Evidence (West 2009), and mine, Introduction to e-Discovery (ABA 2009) and e-Discovery (ABA 2008). This will be a live, spontaneous interview and should be fun. It will, of course, feature the Judge, whom I am honored to present with. The host is Karl A. Schieneman of JurInnov Ltd. He is just getting started in an e-discovery interview series, but has already interviewed Judge Facciola, Jonathan Redgrave, James Daley, and Ron Hedges. More good interviews to come, including Craig Ball, Richard Braman, and Sherry Harris, and even one with me alone. Be sure to check these out.
Visual Evidence/E-Discovery has upgraded VeReview, its web-based review software. It has added advanced searching and reporting capabilities, including Boolean full-text search and concept searching. It helps users view and code documents in .tiff, html, and native file or text formats. More information here.
In2itive Technologies says ezPriv software automates creation of logs of privileged communication for use during the e-discovery review process.
It imports extracted text files of a delimited text file with the extracted text of documents that have been tagged as privileged. Users can then create a line-by-line privilege log and list all information relevant to the privileged communication with the attachment. Full release here.
XMLaw has upgraded its OneView suite. Built on Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint, the suite now provides the ability to tag content both inside and outside of SharePoint. New modules include OneView Extranet, to automate the creation and management of SharePoint-based extranet workspaces. Improvements were also made to OneView Search to enhance performance and scalability.
(Site down for maintenance; press release will be added when it is available.)
E-discovery consulting company JurInnov Ltd. has upgraded its Ringtail Legal On-Demand web-based document management service. (In partnership with FTI Consulting, Jurinnov hosts and manages large Ringtail document repositories for corporations and law firms.) JurInnov has added “Batch Review” and “Master Duplicates” tools. Ringtail Analytics helps users get insight into the content and structure of the collection by presenting the data visually in a cube-shaped dashboard. Full release here.
RenewData will host the eDiscovery in Bankruptcy Cases webinar on March 25. The webinar, presented by RenewData executives, will help corporations and their outside counsel understand what EDD is and how it is applicable to bankruptcy cases. Full release here.
Did you know there really is such a think as the Flat Earth Society. They have there own website and motto: "Deprogramming the masses since 1547." What could this possibly have to do with e-discovery you might wonder? Check out my latest in-depth (4,200 word) blog on e-discovery and trial lawyers. I explore the new report by the American College of Trial Lawyers that everybody is talking about, or soon will be. It is a serious topic of reform and so I use both light satire and earnest respect for the trial lawyers' report. Hopefully it will make you laugh and think at the same time.
Guidance Software Inc.has introduced new EnCase Training On
Demand courses in e-discovery and computer forensics.The on-demand courses complement the company’s classroom training, it says. They offer users a flexible and cost-efficient way to acquire essential skills and stay up-to-date on current practices. Offerings include:
• EnCase eDiscovery OnDemand, offering hands-on training in EnCase eDiscovery for corporate users.
• EnCase Forensic II OnDemand, designed for examiners with strong computer skills, prior computer forensics training, and experience using EnCase Forensic software. Press release here.
.
The company also announced the second edition of its new quarterly magazine, Real eDiscovery. It features an interview with Patrick Oot, director of EDD and senior litigation counsel at Verizon Communications Inc., and a member of LTN’s editorial board.
The Sedona Conference has announced its International Programme on Cross-Border E-Discovery, E-Disclosure and Data Privacy Conflicts. It will be held June 10 and 11 in Barcelona, Spain. Attendees will participate in sessions on efforts to reconcile competing notions of privacy and EDD, cross-border EDD and data privacy in alternate contexts, and potential solutions to cross-border discovery and data privacy conflicts. Full release here.
Guidance Software Inc. has announced it will hold a webinar on metadata's impact on EDD on March 24 at 2:00 pm. Jeffrey Judd, a partner at Howrey, and Albert Barsocchini, the senior director and assistant general counsel for Guidance Software will discuss metadata requirements and case law and EDD processes that don't alter metadata. More information here.
Fios Inc. has scheduled the following webcasts:
More information here.
Arizona-based Informative Graphics Corp. has released a white paper, “Electronic Redaction: How to Properly Redact Documents.” It is designed to help counsel secure personally-identifiable information through electronic redaction, says the company.
The white paper recommends that organizations implement new security technologies incrementally, selecting a redaction expert, formulating a redaction protocol, and writing a formal redaction policy. Full release here.
DRI-The Voice of the Defense Bar has announced it will hold a conference on the impact of EDD on litigation on May 7-8 at the Hilton New York hotel. Speakers will discuss issues in EDD -- including conflicts between U.S. data privacy laws and the E.U. privacy directive -- and offer mock sessions on summary judgment motions and the authentication of data. Full release here.
Clearwell Systems Inc. and H5 will host the Buyer Beware: How TREC Can Help You Evaluate Your E-Discovery Investments webinar on March 19 at 1 PM Eastern. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Legal Track is an evaluation process that develops criteria to compare the effectiveness of search and review methods. The webinar will focus on how TREC can help the legal industry evaluate search and review methods, recent court opinions citing TREC, and how the legal community can use the TREC process to evaluate EDD programs. Full release here.
Keep your seatbelt fastened! Richard Susskind's latest book, "The End of Lawyers?", is a must read. While its scope is much broader than issues surrounding electronic discovery, it discusses the profound impacts that technology is having in the practice of law. Rapid and disruptive change is underway; how will we adapt?
Indep. Newspapers, Inc. v. Brodie, 2009 WL 484956 (Md. Feb. 27, 2009)
In this defamation case, plaintiff/appellee Brodie sought to enforce a subpoena to compel the production of the identities of several persons who posted allegedly defamatory statements about the plaintiff, anonymously, on defendant/appellant Independent Newspaper’s (“Independent”) Internet forum. The circuit court granted Brodie’s motion and ordered Independent to identify the anonymous forum participants. Independent appealed. Finding that the circuit court abused its discretion when it denied Independent’s motion for a protective order because “Brodie had not pleaded a valid defamation claim against any of [the anonymous forum participants],” the appellate court vacated the prior judgment and remanded the case with instructions to grant defendant’s motion for a protective order and quash the subpoena. Read the entire post at ediscoverylaw.com.
Craig Ball's latest column in Law Technology News debunks the myth that it takes lots and lots and lots of effort to clean hard drives.
In the latest issue of Guidance Software Inc.'s Real eDiscovery, a feature article highlights how companies are saving money with in-house EDD technology by not having to make an upfront investment. Full release here.
Akerman Senterfitt Attorney, Ralph Losey Simplifies Complex Legal and Technical
Issues Involved in e-Discovery Best Practices.
Continue reading "ABA Publishes "Next Generation" EDD Book " »
If you are a lawyer, paralegal, or law student you may qualify to be a relevancy reviewer for a grand information science experiment sponsored the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). See: NIST TREC Legal Track, and, Sedona Conference Open Letter. 2009 Legal Track under the leadership of Jason Baron needs volunteers for the 2009 experiment. Read on for the details on how you can be a part of this important scientific research and also see my blog on Jason R. Baron shown above for the full story.
Continue reading "Volunteer for a Scientific EDD Research Project" »
Jurinnov’s Ltd. EDD calculator helps users estimate how much their costs might run. It appraises costs, data volumes, and return on investment based on variables in e-discovery scenarios -- including number of computers, number of peripherals (i.e., smartphones or CDs), server and network data, and necessary processes (system file removal, keyword searching, file deduplication). Try the calculator here.
Document Technologies Inc. has adopted the Clearwell Systems Inc. E-Discovery Platform for the processing, analysis, and review phases of e-discovery. The companies say that the addition of Clearwell’s platform strengthens DTI’s technology for litigation support by providing a tool to quickly cull through data. Full release here.
Document Technologies Inc. has adopted the Clearwell Systems Inc. E-Discovery Platform for the processing, analysis, and review phases of e-discovery. The companies say that the addition of Clearwell’s platform strengthens DTI’s technology for litigation support by providing a tool to quickly cull through data. Full release here.
| ||||
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
|
||||
In this new monthly podcast, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News Monica Bay interviews key experts of the legal technology community on top issues confronting the legal profession.
Monica Bay's Law Technology Now Podcasts are also available as an RSS feed.
Recent Comments