eDJ Contributor: Kevin Esposito
Posts by Kevin Esposito
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- November 1st
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EDRM Mid Year Meeting Update
Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the EDRM Mid Year Meeting in St.Paul, Minnesota. The midyear meeting is a great opportunity for all of the individual project groups to come together and evaluate the progress made on key projects for the year. Although a midyear review may be standard operating procedure for large corporations, few industry groups that I’ve been exposed to have the discipline to insist on such a midyear checkpoint.
posted at 10:03pm on Nov 1st
- May 17th
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EDRM – Building On The Foundation
Various reports state that the famous writer/director Woody Allen once said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. What wasn’t mentioned, however, is that to be truly successful, the other twenty percent consists of working your butt off once you’re there. I reported last week that I was participating at the EDRM Annual Kickoff Meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a very productive week with over 75 people participating in the various work streams. As mentioned previously, many people view EDRM as some sort of static entity – possibly due to the widespread use of the EDRM diagram – but EDRM is anything but static.
posted at 7:35pm on May 17th
- May 12th
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Advancing EDRM – Art Takes Time
The smartest person that I’ve ever known was my mentor when I was living and working in Europe in the 1980’s. I learned a great deal from him about differences in personal management styles and how to build collaborative workgroups in technical environments. Of all of the people that I have known, he is the only one that truly had infinite patience while attacking key issues. Our strategic operating plans would literally stretch over years and as the headstrong ex-pat American executive, I would chafe at what I considered to be the glacial rate of progress. Each time that he saw I was getting frustrated, he would smile slyly and say, “You’re thinking about this as a business process. Remember – It’s not business, we’re creating art. Art takes time.”
posted at 12:44am on May 12th
- April 1st
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The Thoughtful Side Of Retention
Internal retention battles are a good way to torpedo even the most defensible position in litigation. Preparing a cross functional team for working together at the start of a matter will pay dividends – both figuratively and literally – later in the case. As has been previously discussed here, “the beginning” is rarely where these teams are pulled together. The key to success is to determine an appropriate path no matter what stage of the matter you’re pulled in at. Taking inventory of your data and thinking about current and future retention possibilities helps to provide a framework for future decision making.
posted at 4:00pm on Apr 1st
- March 30th
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We’ve Preserved Everything – Now What?
One of the first instructions that IT practitioners will hear from the legal department is “preserve everything”. It doesn’t matter what the context is or whether the information may or may not be relevant, at the first pass a lawyer will always tell you to preserve everything in sight. The problem with preserving information is that preservation is only half the battle – you need to be able to make use of it somewhere down the line and that’s a fact that sometimes gets lost in the shouting.
posted at 8:18pm on Mar 30th
- March 21st
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OK – So What’s The Plan?
The children’s song “Do Re Mi” starts with the line “Let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start”. What seems like a standard concept even for children is anything but when operating in the world of eDiscovery. In many engagements, we’re brought into the mix long after work has started and asked to take over bits and pieces of what one or more groups of people have been working on. Although you might be presented with hard drives, images, backup tapes and paper, very rarely will you be provided with that key ingredient – “The Plan”. It really doesn’t matter if you’re in-house counsel, outside counsel or a third party consultant. In many discovery matters, you’ll be brought into a situation and asked to “handle it”. Sometimes it seems as though the requestor takes a [...]
posted at 12:00pm on Mar 21st
- March 17th
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The Once and Future Lawyer – A St. Patrick’s Day Story
According to Wikipedia, a seanchaí is a traditional Irish storyteller/historian. A commonly encountered English spelling of the Irish word is shanachie. All lawyers need to be able to tell stories to convey facts and explain concepts. They do this for judges, to juries and occasionally among clients. For such a task, there’s no better preparation than kissing the Blarney Stone.
posted at 4:50pm on Mar 17th
- March 1st
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The One Thousand Foot View
Greetings to all of the readers of the eDiscoveryJournal. I’m pleased to join you as the newest correspondent and hope that you will find that what l share in this forum is useful. Now that I’m here, I’m sure some of you are wondering, “Just what is an independent consultant going to share?” Some may suspect that there will be a dry recitation of product reviews and hardware specs. Some may worry that I’m going to belabor yet again subjects such as “Are instant messages ‘records’?” And some that have heard me speak in public worry that I might just take off all the safeties and satirize what I see out there in the eDiscovery business world. While the last is the most tempting, I personally hate when the Internet is used to push personal agendas. No dear friends, I intend to do the practical thing and provide you with the “One Thousand Foot View”.
posted at 1:37pm on Mar 1st