Monthly Archives: January 2024

Whether we are talking about custodial preservation, journal archiving or any collection/export technology, my moto has always been, ‘trust but verify’. We all learn from our earliest mistakes. Mine was trusting some Microsoft consultant’s that helped me build an email search tool to respond to the first Enron related subpoenas. That drove home the lesson that every environment, data stream and software version need validation testing and ongoing QC checks. Believe me, I hate finding bugs or non-compliance at my clients. I know that I will end up having to write the plain language explanation of any potential data loss or incomplete productions. Enterprise IT departments generally have a lab environment and perform documented acceptance/compatibility tests prior to moving a new application/version to the production environment. Too many legal and compliance professionals have relied on their providers without performing similar validation tests with known data sets and consistently checking different phases of processing, review rules, redaction settings and productions. Now that enterprises are migrating live data under legal hold to Office 365 or other cloud platforms, testing is critical to demonstrate your reasonable faith in these ‘inaccessible’ systems. By that misappropriated term of art, I mean that you no longer have direct access to the storage and databases. So what are some of my basic validation test?

ILTACON 2017 has wrapped up and I managed a lightning pass of briefings, meetings and socializing in Vegas. Overall, I am impressed at how ILTA has grown up and may even have stolen the crown from LNTY for best consumer legal technology event. I broke down the sponsorship number comparison in a recent blog. It will come as no surprise that ILTA’s 5 day event in a Vegas casino complex feels a lot less crowded than the 3 days of LTNY in a Manhattan hotel. Neither event really publishes attendance numbers (LTNY site claims 10k+). ILTA seems to attract the consumer/practitioner while LTNY has evolved into more of a provider/sales event. The ILTA exhibit hall had steady foot traffic and actual buyers on my forays. As one sponsor noted, tech partners and support services dominated the floor more than giant Relativity channel partners trying to snap up the dwindling supply of big cases without a dedicated review team. In visual terms, blue dominated the exhibit floor instead of kCura orange. Several attendees remarked that the show was well organized with lots of opportunities to talk with other practioners instead of just being talked at by provider panels (yep, those same panels I was moderating until recently). Most of my meetings were client RFP driven, but here are some non-confidential briefing/meeting outtakes and photos:

I am one of the lucky Houstonians whose home survived Harvey relativity intact. We were fortunate to be able to shelter friends, help rescue those stranded and contribute to the recovery effort even as the run-off water put other areas under water. It has been hard to get my head back into work, but I wanted to call attention to my friend Craig Ball’s blog on post flooding data recovery and share a couple thoughts on disaster planning for eDiscovery. We make the “in case you get hit by a bus” joke about that one paralegal or lit support tech who knows where everything eDiscovery lives. But what happens when a bus named Harvey, Katrina or Sandy takes out the team and all regional support services? When a natural disaster costs upwards of $190 billion, you can bet that there will be reasonable disagreements over decisions made before, during and after that disaster. And our society generally resolves such disputes in the courts. A good example of reasonably anticipated litigation is the flooding around the San Jacinto river that some think resulted from the decision not to pre-release water from the upstream Lake Conroe dam. But what happens when your legal staff are either refugees or volunteers helping clean up their community?

I am proud of how Texas and Louisiana civilians jumped into the floodwaters to help neighbors, strangers and first responders. This contrasted sharply to how institutionalized disaster relief seems to take longer and longer to deliver effective support where and when it is desperately needed. That is not a criticism of those who have so freely shared their possessions, time and money through charities and other NGOs. Instead, it is a broader professional observation about the potential loss of focus and effectiveness that accompanies the transition of a group effort into an organizational entity. To quote Samuel Butler, “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” Over time, organizations tend to become more concerned with justifying their growth, budget, authority or other self-interests over the actual goals they were created to serve. So how does this apply to our world of eDiscovery?

Excuse me for hijacking my professional musings to share some personal moments that went viral. It is at least a good reminder of how a picture, email, text or other ESI can propagate beyond our illusions of privacy and controls. All it takes is a camera phone or a well-placed Reuter’s photographer to be surprised by your own pictures in your feeds. Rather than retell the story of our tiny efforts in the larger Harvey response, here is the local write up. And here are some of places our pictures showed up:

Back in July I cautiously reported some potential issues encountered while running normal acceptance/validation testing on client’s Security and Compliance Center. I am sad to report that despite opening several MS support tickets, we are no closer to understanding why large PST exports will unexpectedly crash without reporting an error or why items on hold seem to be disappearing from search results. In the intervening months, I have been deluged with similar stories from Microsoft partner products, fellow forensic consultants and sharp corporate litigation support techs who follow my ‘trust but verify’ maxim. I did not make the EDI Summit last week, but I did get some interesting reports from clients and peers about the O365 sessions.

Just a fast reminder that I will be at RelativityFest Monday and Tuesday. This year I have decided to actually hit sessions and am only scheduling a formal briefing with the Relativity team. That gives me more time to socialize and talk shop with peers old and new. Email me at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com if you want to try to cross paths in the chaos. I always love to hear new perspectives and make new friends. Please take a second to do my short Relativity Consumption Poll. I am interested in getting a better idea of how real consumers are buying and using the Relativity platform. Sorry that life, storms and other crazy adventures have slowed my usual writing pace, but I am back at the keyboard and want to know how or if you use the market dominant technology. Next poll with focus on O365.

Several peers sent me links to the unfolding spoliation scandal regarding the Georgia election server that was wiped shortly after a suit was filed. There is not enough information yet to ascertain the context of the wipe, but the FBI took an image in March as part of their own election tampering investigation which hopefully preserved the critical evidence. As many have observed, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up.” Former BP engineer Kurt Mix discovered that the hard way with a 20 year sentence after destroying 17 text messages regarding the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill response. Maybe the technician’s at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University acted in good faith and were just decommissioning the server and back-ups. Maybe. Many of my clients have legacy hardware and applications that have never been properly decommissioned because they are under active legal hold(s). IT execs are racing to shut down their data and CoLo centers in their flight to the Cloud. So what do you do with a legacy server that was put under legal hold for perpetual serial litigation or criminal investigations where the authorities refuse to issue a formal release for decades?

How to describe talking shop with CEO Andrew Sieja, Shawn Gaines and Jacque Flarherty after the team has spent days hosting two thousand peers and customers? Frenetic comes to mind. Our briefing topic hopped faster than a sexaholic swiping right on Tinder (see Andrew’s hysterical keynote malapropism below). I always enjoy these meetings and since I already caught you up after my ILTA briefing, we focused on what made Relativity Fest different from LTNY and the traditional trade shows.

I took a long break from managing RFP’s for clients while eDJ tilted at the market analyst windmills. Those long five years of research prepared me to define client requirements, budget ROI support and to manage the subsequent Request for Proposal (RFP) process. Unfortunately, they also let me forget how few sales organizations/reps are mature enough to view an independent consultant as anything more than an impediment to converting the prospect to a closed deal. Too many modern reps are sales speed daters focused on creating an artificial relationship with the ‘decision makers’ that they can leverage into an emotion based sale. That perspective transforms my role from facilitator to duenna. They are so busy trying to bypass the imaginary gatekeeper that they miss the opportunity to educate and cultivate an advocate who deeply understands the client pain points, politics and goals. Below are some carefully anonymized sales tactics to be avoided by reps AND clients. Love to hear some of your pet peeves.