Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-26 18:07:42Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. If the term Early Case Assessment (ECA) causes you to roll your eyes and reach for a copy of your JD/MBA buzzword bingo sheet, you’re not alone. ECA is a term thrown around by technology providers ranging from email archiving vendors to actual document review vendors. But, just [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-01-30 08:01:03Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. Much to my surprise, there are many who believe that the email archiving market is dying fast. As evidence, they point to:The introduction of Microsoft Exchange 2010 with native archiving capabilitiesThe struggles of pure-play archiving vendors to compete with larger vendors like Symantec and the aforementioned Exchange 2010The [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2010-02-02 01:39:40Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. LegalTech New York is appropriately scheduled early in the year. Optimism is high, marketing budgets flush, and sales plans are bullish. In the past, LegalTech has tended to be blustery. Too many vendors put out meaningless press releases in an effort to drum up buzz. Too much of [...]
As a result of the potential for significant sanctions, one of the first information governance initiatives organizations seek to implement is legal hold – or litigation hold (yet another example of how much confusing industry jargon is out there). Implemented well, legal hold can help an organization avoid sanctions and improve both the efficacy and efficiency of downstream eDiscovery activities – collection, processing, and review.
One of the hot topics at LegalTech 2010 was cloud computing. “The cloud,” as we like to refer to it, promises to offer cost savings and other efficiencies – in an economy obsessed with cost reduction, the buzz around the cloud is not surprising.
While utility computing holds much promise, there are also examples of SaaS being used effectively in the eDiscovery market. EDD processors offer a web-based interface to case data. These interfaces provide varying levels of review functionality. When you think about it, hosted review has long been a staple of this market and the review platforms of vendors like CaseCentral, Kroll Ontrack, and Iron Mountain / Stratify are really SaaS applications.
One of the topics bouncing around LTNY was the new SaaS pricing of $100/GB/year for processing, hosting and review by Houston based Sfile Technology Corporation. In this world of hidden pricing, NDA wrapped RFPs and other hide-the-ball licensing games, Sfile is publishing their upfront pricing and undercutting the current market average of $300-500/GB by a huge margin. Aside from the usual belly-aching from other processing-hosting providers, I expected that most of my corporate and firm clients would be excited about the potential downward price pressure.
Several recent blog posts and discussions on various industry listservs have raised interesting issues about the potential problems and benefits of consultants working for and with software and service providers. See John Heckman’s post ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway?’ as well as Seth Rowland’s ‘Sales vs Consulting – The Cost of Independence’ for some well developed criticisms of consultant’s who are compensated by the seller instead of the buyers. Steve Miller’s ‘What is a Consultant, Anyway? My Two Cents’ provides some counterpoints supporting vendor relationships for consultants. These opinions seem to originate from the software sales area instead of actual consulting on cases.
In Consultants Part 1, I explored the different kinds of eDiscovery related consultants and how they came to be from the mid 1990’s to today. No we can look at the ethical issues facing subject matter experts in their different roles. Lawyers, accountants and physicians and other traditional advisory experts work within a well defined framework of legal and ethical standards that define their fiduciary responsibilities to their clients. There are no such regulatory or standards bodies governing eDiscovery experts as yet. In part, this is because such consultants are expected to deliver their advice directly to counsel, who should make the final legal determination.
As inside and outside counsel struggle with ever larger ESI collections, the question of appropriate sample sizes for quality assurance pops up on the national lists, conference panels and in social gatherings of law geeks. There are many different statistical theories that can be used to calculate the relative probability that the results of a sample set can be extrapolated against the total collection. In simpler terms, sampling is used to define how confident we are in an assertion when we have not or cannot review every single item due to scale, availability, cost or time. This is expressed as the Confidence Interval or Confidence Range. Do not worry, I am not a statistician and have no intention of even trying to translate significance levels, variability parameters or estimation errors. Instead, I will talk about how sampling can apply to the discovery process.