Posts Tagged ‘collection’
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- January 24th
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Walking the Lines of Transparency and Attorney-Client Privilege for ESI – An Interview with Sarah Jane Gillett, Partner at Hall Estill
In the highly litigious oil and gas industry, outside counsel must ensure that they have conducted adequate due diligence in managing and producing electronic evidence. The line of transparency and privilege is a difficult one to walk. In part one of this two-part interview, Sarah Jane Gillett, Partner at Hall Estill, gives an overview of the increased responsibility to preserve and subsequently produce relevant documents in various forms, and some insights into what exactly is protected by attorney-client privilege: AS: Can you give a brief overview of the increased responsibility to preserve and subsequently produce relevant documents in various forms? Sarah Jane Gillett: There is no question that counsel today must be cognizant of the responsibility to identify and potentially collect various forms of evidence at an extremely early stage of any litigation or investigation. While the Federal Rules of [...]
posted at 11:42am on Jan 24th
- January 20th
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Unexpected Challenges of Enterprise Remote Collection
The astronomical growth in corporate data has driven the practice of eDiscovery away from just the forensic imaging of physical hard drives. The first systems for remote collection of email containers, Office files and other ESI from desktops, laptops and servers appeared in the 2004-2006 time period. I might have been one of the earliest beta testers for Guidance’s Encase Enterprise platform when I was managing the litigation technology for El Paso Corporation back then. Since then, the market has seen a wide variety of new appliances, just-in-time apps and other remote collection technologies. Most appear to promise a ‘push button’ automated collection by IT or Legal with minimal or no impact to working users. Legal sets the scope (date ranges, file types, names or search terms), and the system does all the work in the background. I just wish that it was that easy in the wild west of real world enterprise environments.
posted at 11:00am on Jan 20th
- December 27th
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Practical QC in eDiscovery
One key element for transforming your eDiscovery from an ad hoc reactive fire drill into a mature, proactive business process is the development and implementation of formal Quality Assurance(QA) and Quality Control(QC). I have always viewed QA as tackling ongoing process improvement such as regular cross case comparisons, while QC tends to be checking on did the process perform properly. Basically, how can we make the process better versus did everything work right? When interviewing corporate client eDiscovery teams, everyone is conscious of the need for QA/QC, but the vast majority seem to feel that it is impractical or unrealistic given their tight deadlines, lack of resources and typical fire-fighter mentality. Some law firm clients have swung to the opposite extreme, with elaborate workflow, check lists, physical chain of custody forms and more. Their QC has grown out of reasonable proportion and their productivity suffers because their overall QA has been neglected. So how do we achieve a reasonable quality process without bringing the legal process to a halt?
posted at 10:02am on Dec 27th
- December 13th
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Is Preservation “In Place” Technology the Panacea to the Preservation Headache?
I have spent countless hours over the last 5 years searching for the cure to many of my e-discovery ills: technology that will hold data in place for purposes of complying with preservation obligations in litigation. I am not referring to sending legal hold notices to custodians of data or self-collection. I am referring to actually locking down data…In a diverse technology environment…Without interrupting the business…And while we’re at it, can we apply retention policies? Based on my own experience and on multiple discussions with in-house practitioners, I strongly believe in-place preservation would take many of the headaches out of the preservation burdens faced by serial corporate litigants. Last week at the The Exchange event in Los Angeles Laura Kibbe, a thought leader in the industry, brought the topic up in one of the sessions. While acknowledging that we simply aren’t there [...]
posted at 4:21pm on Dec 13th
- November 9th
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The Cloud Does Not Kill Off On-Premise eDiscovery Solutions
Cloud computing is a hot topic. The cloud’s ability to provide solutions that are lower cost and simpler to manage just cannot be ignored. Our recent SaaS survey showed that approximately 75% of respondents are leaning toward SaaS or hybrid on-premise/SaaS solutions for eDiscovery. Craig Ball recently put out a very interesting article about how running eDiscovery technology in the cloud will be more efficient. Craig goes so far as to say, “cloud computing makes collection unnecessary.”
posted at 11:32am on Nov 9th
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The Social Age of Evidence Collection
I’m delighted to present a guest post, from consultant Sean Martin: today’s law firms ready for the social age of evidence collection? Distribution of information across various online services leads to a frightening lack of visibility and control for organizations. Forensically sound evidence with a provable chain of custody is crucial in making, breaking, or even avoiding a case. Most organizations and supporting legal firms have previously cracked the code for collecting this information, using tried and true, and typically well-known, processes, tools, and services to secure emails and hard drives as evidence. Most firms will use service providers to perform the evidence collection, hashing the data to show it had not changed. But there seems to be a trend moving toward self-collection, remote collection, and the use of online services; with this comes issues of trust and, more importantly, the ability to prove. (Editor’s note: Watch for Sean Doherty’s Compare & Contrast in the Dec. issue of LTN). A key driver for this trend is cost. Costs are being driven up due to the large amounts of data being generated by individuals and organizations alike.There is more information created in mini blocks coming from a multitude of online sources such as collaboration tools and social networks. Consider Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter for sharing records and snippets of information. There are also vast amounts of large data being shared and stored outside of traditional business processes. Consider information that is too large to send through the corporate email services which then finds its way onto a Cloud-based file sharing service such as DropBox or Ftopia. This information, none or every bit of which could be significant case matter, is almost certainly being shared through mediums and channels residing outside of the organization. Consider the simple fact that at August’s International Legal Technology Association conference in Nashville, at one session with about 200 attendees, I could spot only about five people who did not have an Apple iPad; meaning roughly 195 of them did. It would be a pretty safe bet to assume that at least one of the iPad users had a social network messaging application installed (i.e., Facebook) or a file sharing app installed (i.e., DropBox). With the tools and services available to the average consumer, we find today’s business data is much more disparate in nature — meaning it no longer all resides on a physical hard drive that belongs to the organization and that can be referred back to as a concrete source of evidence during a case. Rather, today’s business data can be found all over the place, in multiple online repositories and communications channels, too few controlled by the organization, and most set up and managed directly by the employee. An additional point worth recognizing is that the data could be there one minute and gone the next. This fragile data environment makes it extremely difficult for organizations to prove that they collected the evidence properly. For example, screenshots simply won’t work as evidence;…
posted at 8:18am on Nov 9th
- November 4th
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Manage ESI Dangers With Targeted Collections
Over the past several years, courts have issued numerous decisions on sanctions for spoliation exclusively involving electronically stored information issues. According to a Duke Law Journal article from spring 2011, 188 different federal district cour…
posted at 7:46am on Nov 4th
- October 18th
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X1 Discovery Ships Social Media Discovery Software
Pasadena-based X1 Discovery, the Idealab-backed electronic discovery firm split out from X1, said today that it has shipped its first product, X1 Social Discovery. The firm said its new product is specifically designed to address social media content, …
posted at 8:45am on Oct 18th
- October 17th
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E-Discovery 101: 5 Tips to Help You Keep It Short and Simple (“KISS”)
I don’t know one person that enjoys participating in something they aren’t very good at. I roll my eyes every time we visit some friends that want to play Trivial Pursuit. The reason I frown at playing that game is because I’m not very… Read more
posted at 8:01pm on Oct 17th
- October 4th
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A Round of eDJ Review Deep Dives
It has been a busy couple of weeks. The new eDJ Tech Matrix has been gaining steam, which has required lots of deep product dive sessions and new features to categorize. I thought that I should call out some interesting highlights:
TotalDiscovery from BIA is now offering a subscription pricing for legal hold notification at $1/Custodian/Month. Yet another sign that eDiscovery is moving towards true cloud subscription licensing.
Mitratech’s TeamConnect is also available on a Saas subscription model. It has been a while since I got to dig into their offerings and I was impressed by the customizable dashboards and sharp J2EE-based platform. I was pleased to see that they had already added the new L600 series UTMBS eDiscovery code set that was ratified by the LEDES Oversight Committee on July 13, 2011. The ongoing project is drafting expanded eDiscovery activity and expense codes, so I hope to hear of more legal billing systems incorporating the new codes.posted at 8:35am on Oct 4th