Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2017-11-12 19:00:00Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Last week presented me with not one, but two opportunities to shut up and listen as clients made unexpected strategic decisions. These won’t be the last times that clients deviate from ‘the plan’. After all, my job is to do the research and groundwork for them to make [...]
Several months back I wrote a very careful piece detailing some potential errors or unexplained behavior seen with clients using Office 365’s Compliance Center (E3 license level) to apply holds and export search results. I was careful not to ring the ‘O365 is broken’ bell without full explanation and giving Microsoft the chance to debug the behavior. I have been a product manager and had to put out reputation fires sparked by well-meaning customers who fundamentally misunderstood the system or with unstable data/infrastructure. Luckily for me, we had redundant data repositories and although it would have been nice to shift to O365 for some things, it was not required. That meant we wanted to get to the bottom of the behavior, but it was not high client priority. The first line tech support did their best, but really could not understand why we cared about result sets that did not match up exactly. A friend in Redmond caught wind of things and got the tickets escalated. I would love to say that I was 100% sure that we understood the source of all the search behavior, but I do have a much better appreciation for the recent changes to the Office 365 search architecture and data sources. I covered some of the information dump in my recent RelativityFest 2017 blog and I wanted to circle back on the actual search/export issues.
For several years I have monitored the slow recognition and rise of mobile device content in civil discovery. I have run annual surveys, market reports and even put on mobile eDiscovery boot camps. Although it has taken longer than I expected back, I am now encountering substantial vendor charges to acquire, process and review text messages, chat conversations and other ‘business communications’ from Android and iOS phones during my annual ‘eDiscovery Cost/ROI Savings’ reports for long term clients. They are often surprised at how clever providers low ball the collection fees down to $250-400/device while burying exorbitant forensic tech time charges in the processing fees. My clients thought they understood the cost to agreeing to add phones to the accessible ESI source list, only to get sticker shock when I add up all the subsequent forensic time and data processing charges for an average $2,500+ per device total cost just to get it into Relativity. I encourage clients and peers to think through and demand estimates for the total cost associated with what I call 3rd generation ESI data sources before acquiescing to the typical overly broad discovery request. If you embrace the classic, “preserve broadly and review narrowly” model, you may consider investing in basic software and training to enable your corporate legal support or data security teams image unlocked mobile devices when the content is potentially relevant. So how much will that cost?
I received some good commentary and recommendations from your peers that I wanted to share with my own perspective. Credit for the good points goes to peers, any mistakes are obviously mine. Keep the feedback coming. • Examiner downtime – Several peers commented about the exorbitant cost associated with examiner downtime during scheduled collection days. It doesn’t help to have the leverage of 5 or 10 acquisition stations if custodians are late, or worse fail to show up to deliver devices. Apparently it was a chronic problem for laptop image collections that unexpectedly extended into MD images when the custodian had to sign off.
A teacher friend asked me to give a presentation on forensic science to her high school class. I agreed thinking I had so many eDiscovery 101 decks in my files that it would be easy to pull something fun together in an hour. My presentations for sales teams, venture capital investors, new lit support techs and such really did not seem to be that relevant to teens. It was easy enough to throw together slides defining forensic science, funny pics from my CSI days and the ‘CSI effect’ with the gratuitous Gil Grisham headshot. But even the basics of criminal/civil/investigation workflows seemed out of touch to their world. Then it hit me – iPhones! They all had iPhones and things on those phones that they did not want anyone to access.
Q3 has been relatively quiet for major Purview eDiscovery releases. The primary area that eDiscovery peers should watch is the steady integration of CoPilot generative AI and Loop content across the M365 suite. In response to a recent request, I did run fast tests to confirm that Teams meeting transcripts are searchable and seem to still be stored in hidden folders within the [...]
Like many of you, I am filling my social/business for LegalWeek. Providers and peers should claim a briefing slot on my Booking page before they fill up. As always, I track the rough metrics on LegalWeek sponsors and exhibitors (see graphs below). Reviewing my coverage of LegalWeek 2023 has me excited to see how 2024 stacks up. Will the exhibit floor still be [...]