eDJ Contributor: Chuck Rothman
Chuck is a recognized expert in both electronic discovery and computer forensics in Canada and the U.S., and a frequent lecturer at Canadian e-discovery conferences. He has authored numerous articles, co-authored "Electronic Discovery in Canada: Best Practices and Guidelines", and wrote a chapter on cost containment in the upcoming 2nd edition of E-Discovery in Canada.
Posts by Chuck Rothman
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- May 17th
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Separating the Wheat from the eDiscovery Software Chaff
There are hundreds of e-discovery software applications available. Every stage of the EDRM can be assisted by one or more commercially available applications. Some of these are designed for very specific functions, such as trial presentation, while others claim to have multiple parts that can be used at different EDRM stages, such as software that collects, processes, analyses and reviews electronic information. The marketing collateral that accompanies many of these products proclaim each of them as “the best” at what they do. They advertise various types of functions, such as near duplicate identification, conceptual clustering, predictive coding, etc. With all the different options available, how can one filter out the “sales-speak” and actually evaluate an e-discovery offering on its merits? The following tips may help: 1. Make sure the software fits you, not the other way around The reason you [...]
posted at 10:00am on May 17th
- April 17th
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“P” is for Processing: Part 3
Parts 1 and 2 of this series illustrated some of the issues that should be considered when processing electronic records. This final part continues the discussion and ends with a checklist of questions to ask, in addition to the per-gig cost. Searchable Content Most electronic records contain words. Some are typed into a computer, some are scanned from printed material, and some are even spoken. In most cases, it is this content in which a reviewer is most interested. For files created by typing (such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and emails), it is a simple procedure for the processing software to extract the text. However, what text should be extracted? Word documents may contain redlining; Excel spreadsheets might contain hidden cells, formulas and notes; PowerPoints can contain hidden slides and speaker notes. While the decision of whether to include some [...]
posted at 11:00am on Apr 17th
- April 11th
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“P” is for Processing: Part 2
E-Discovery processing involves much more than just multiplying the number of gigabyte by the per-gig rate. In the first part of this series, we looked at what processing does under the hood, and how to ensure that duplicate records are properly identified. This part continues the discussion. Emails and Attachments When the email is extracted from its container (PST file, etc), its attachments are embedded into the resulting file. In order to review attachments separately from their parent email, each attachment needs to be extracted from the email file. This is a standard part of e-discovery processing. However, when conducting a native review, what format should the native email, without attachment, take? In many cases, it ends up being the email extracted from its container, with all the attachments still embedded!. This leads to some issues: 1. From a cost [...]
posted at 9:00am on Apr 11th
- April 4th
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“P” is for Processing: Part 1
Although Processing is smack dab in the middle of the EDRM, little real consideration is paid to it. When going through the various EDRM steps, processing does play a role, but to most practitioners, processing is equivalent to a cost item on the e-discovery budget sheet, and little more. If you know the volume of data that needs processing and the applicable cost per gigabyte, you can check off processing and move on to the more exciting steps of analysis and review. In many cases, unlike the review tool, the software used to process the data is rarely even specified. This reality is unfortunate, because the cost and efficiency of an e-discovery project is significantly impacted by the way processing is carried out. This series outlines some of the lesser known steps of e-discovery processing that can help to make [...]
posted at 9:00am on Apr 4th
- March 14th
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What is this Predictive Coding thing Anyway?
Anyone who has read about e-Discovery in the past year has almost certainly come across the term “Predictive Coding” or one of its aliases. As exemplified by the number of seminars and vendor’s banners at Legal Tech in New York this past month, it’s definitely this year’s e-Discovery craze. However, like most technology trends, the term “Predictive Coding” has come to mean a lot of different things. While fighting my way through the throngs of legal techno-geeks on the LegalTech vendors floor, I came across no fewer than ten completely different definitions of the term. The definitions ranged from “a system that assists in separating the legal wheat from the chaff”, “a system that proposes to automatically cull data before its collected”, to “a system that provides “predictive” objective coding of scanned images”. Almost every vendor seemed to want to [...]
posted at 8:00am on Mar 14th